All Questions
0
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0answers
26 views
Pronominalization: a handbook for secret agents
I recently learnt that Edward Witten, the world's best string theorist Wikipedia entry, wrote a paper on generative grammar, called
"Pronominalization: a handbook for secret agents",
as you ...
2
votes
1answer
50 views
Is there use of a trilled “L” sound in any language? Is a trilled “L” even possible?
I've seen nothing on a trilled "L" sound anywhere. I've tried producing the trilled "L" sound and I can get something that seems similar. Is it possible to trill an "L" and if so are there any ...
0
votes
0answers
18 views
PinYin Command Line Tool [closed]
I am looking for PinYin Command Line Tool:
Which can change Chinese Text, for example:
1 起初神创造天地。
in WordSeparated, Character Separeted by Dual PinYin Tonal and Diacritic Marks:
1 ...
2
votes
0answers
25 views
How do I romanize words from the Akha Language?
I'm sorry for putting up such a specific question here but any help will be really appreciated.
Akha is the language spoken by the Akha people of southern China (Yunnan Province), eastern Burma ...
0
votes
2answers
38 views
How many moras in [steak]? I produced two moras.
I drew the syllable structure for steak, and I deduced that 'st' is one cluster and forms part of the onset instead of the rhyme. So that leaves the rhyme with eI and k which will give me two moras. ...
2
votes
1answer
52 views
finite/non-finite verb = conjugated/non-conjugated verb
Are those terms totally interchangeable in all contexts (finite = conjugated) (non-finite = conjugated) or are there slight meaning differences?
1
vote
0answers
37 views
Hebrew - Arabic grammar book
I've been searching for quite a long time for a Hebrew-Arabic grammar book to study both languages in more depth at the same time while being able to compare similar roots and the root system for ...
1
vote
0answers
72 views
Why the english past tense -ed pronounced differently in some words?
Why is the suffix for [looked] and [hugged] pronounced differently. How can I explain this process via Feature Geometry?
[EDIT] I know the following words respectively sound as follows lʊkt and ...
0
votes
0answers
16 views
Where and why were capital letters first used in English headlines? [migrated]
The words in headlines are capitalized. I'm interested in the history of this.
Where and why were capital letters first used in headlines? Where is this practice of capitalization of words in English ...
2
votes
0answers
38 views
How common is phonemic vowel length across languages?
Including different kinds of length distinctions, such as in stressed syllables only, or stressed and unstressed, etc.
5
votes
1answer
112 views
Is there a named common ancestor of Germanic and Latin besides “Indo-European”?
I was just answering a question about the origins of English and Latin and wanted to talk about their common ancestors but ran into a surprising problem.
So we know the majority of languages in ...
0
votes
0answers
20 views
How is English a Germanic Language if it has so many Latin Roots? [duplicate]
I grew up on the misconception that English is a romance language, after all it has so many latin roots, I don't even know what Greek languages are.
Why is English considered a Germanic language? And ...
0
votes
1answer
48 views
Where does the word “How” come from?
Spanish and Italian both have como / come if I'm not mistaken, however English has how. Where did we get how from?
I read somewhere that it's Germanic, but I thought German developed from Latin roots ...
0
votes
2answers
78 views
Why does English have both Latin and Greek origins
I always assumed that Latin and Greek were related due to English having so many roots from both-but they aren't, right? So why does English have so many Greek and Latin roots?
1
vote
1answer
83 views
What are those languages with no one-to-one correspondence between sound and written symbol?
English is not one of those, while German should be. Italian is one of those and French is not. So it seems that this feature does not depend on the linguistic similarity and historical relation among ...
1
vote
1answer
63 views
Are there glides in Italian?
Italian has diphthongs when you put together two vowels, like in the word "uomo". As far as I understand a diphthong is not necessarily a glide, because a glide has to be less sonorous than a vowel. ...
0
votes
0answers
20 views
What is the role of syntax in semantic role labling?
For semantic role labeling process, is it enough to just using some corpora like FrameNet and PropBank, or we must have some syntactic annotated corpora using dependency grammar?
1
vote
2answers
31 views
How does language produce identities?
I've come to understand that language plays a central role in producing political identities such as "black", "white"; "man", "woman", "genderqueer"; "heterosexual", "queer". How exactly does language ...
1
vote
2answers
65 views
Does any language contrast more than two trills?
Last night I was thinking about the trill sounds and how most languages I know about have just one, though they vary in which one they have.
Most common seems to be the alveolar trill /r/, as in ...
1
vote
2answers
83 views
Why was korea able to remove kanji but japan wasn't when both languages use homophones?
I am strictly interested in the question of homophones and kanji. Korean has homophones yet they removed the Chinese characters and are getting by just fine? Or are they?
Japanese kanji lovers say ...
3
votes
1answer
89 views
Are there any atelic ditransitive verbs (or verb phrases)?
I am wondering if there are any verbs/phrases that qualify both as ditransitive, and as atelic. The following shows the relevant tests. The satisfying verb/phrase should have the same * patterns as ...
0
votes
0answers
14 views
Recent material (papers, books, etc) about Developmental Orthography
I have made a quick search on the internet about Developmental Orthography, but the papers and research projects I found are not very recent, some almost 20 years old. Apart from that almost all of ...
0
votes
0answers
19 views
Articles Books on Automated Writing Evaluation Techniques
I have long been out of the NLP game, but I am curious to get back in. I wanted to know about modern techniques for doing automated writing evaluation of English texts. I want to take essay-form ...
0
votes
2answers
35 views
Constraints on Kartvelian preverbs
In Georgian and its related languages there is a concept of the "preverb", which is much like the separable and inseparable verb prefixes in German or in English phrasal verbs with a preposition or ...
5
votes
0answers
58 views
What is the name of the grammatical aspect conveyed by the English auxiliary “keep”?
All the English speakers in this group are familiar with the use of "keep" to convey persistent action, whether the action is repeated (He kept knocking the ball off the table) or maintained (The ball ...
4
votes
0answers
97 views
What exactly is the “i” in iPad, iPhone, iMac etc. linguistically speaking?
You might ask now:
What does the "i" stand for?
Well, according to the following article
http://www.iphonejd.com/iphone_jd/2009/01/the-i-in-iphone.html
the "i" was originally meant to stand ...
2
votes
1answer
52 views
Sumerian cuneiform dictionary?
Is there a single, unified place where one can look up cuneiform signs for Sumerian words? Unicode now supports cuneiform, but every source I've found has only transliterations, not actual cuneiform.
...
-2
votes
2answers
59 views
Caucasoid people, Common Genetic roots and Common Proto-Language? [closed]
It is so probable that all Caucasoid people have had a common ancestor.
Does The fact that most of Caucasoid people speak a Semitic or Indo-European language not suggest that there has been an ...
4
votes
1answer
36 views
Best method for buidling a learner corpus for DDL
I'm looking for a set of free and (somewhat) easy tools that I can use with my EFL writing students next semester. I want to analyze their initial essays and look for common errors that can be ...
1
vote
2answers
79 views
The reason for similarity of Turkic “min” and latin “mille”, Turkic “dil” and dutch “taal”?
What's the linguistic relation between
the Turkic words bin or min and Latin word mille meaning thousand
Turkic dil and dutch taal meaninge language?
3
votes
1answer
59 views
How does PGmc.fl- change to Goth. thl-, such as PGmc *fleuhaną to Goth. þliuhan?
The example is a cognate of flee:
fleuhaną
Descendants[edit]
Old English: flēon
English: flee
Old Frisian: fliā
Old Saxon: fliohan
Old Dutch: *flion
Middle Dutch: vlien
Dutch: ...
-1
votes
1answer
30 views
How to measure importance of language? [closed]
My question is especially about how we can measure importance and choose a second language for us. It is not a secret that in a variety of aspects English is first language by its importance.
So how ...
1
vote
2answers
42 views
Seeking free grammar or detailed description of Avar
The more I learn about the Georgian language the more eager I am to compare it with nearby Caucasian languages, to which it is not related but shares a common Sprachbund with.
Although I'm also ...
1
vote
0answers
30 views
Is there an English prosodic dictionary?
I am no longer in school but I am intrigued by linguistic analysis--do not fear, this question is not for an assignment. I recently thought up of a couple examples of structural ambiguity that got me ...
7
votes
1answer
115 views
Why do different languages have different amounts of unique words for numbers between 10 and 20?
I've read a similar question here which mainly dealt with why English only has eleven and twelve as unique words with some interesting ideas. But my question is why do different languages have ...
1
vote
2answers
33 views
Which features of Georgian verbs can cause an initial “ა” (a) to become an “ე” (e)?
Kartvelian languages such Georgian have a very complex agglutinative verb structure.
Georgian is very well studied but there's not a lot of self-study books or online sites that go really in depth. I ...
2
votes
2answers
52 views
Checking grammar of non-English text (NLP)
I am writing a program that will take input from users in non-English languages (German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese) and will need to determine whether the input is grammatically ...
1
vote
2answers
61 views
Convert audio recording of word to IPA representation
Are the any open source tools/software libraries to convert an audio clip to its IPA representation? If so, are they accurate? If not, why not?
Here is a Gaelic word I wish to convert:
Ogg format:
...
0
votes
0answers
33 views
What does a phonemic rewrite mean?
We have been doing phonemic rules in class, and our professor says to write a "phonemic rewrite" of words based on these rules, where these words are written like so "/_/". While I understand the ...
2
votes
0answers
85 views
Is there a general tendency among East Asian languages toward simple syllable structure?
I've noticed that several languages of East Asia and the Pacific islands like Japanese, Chinese, and Hawaiian, have much stricter rules governing phonotactics than languages in other parts of the ...
5
votes
0answers
74 views
Personal vs. Demonstrative Pronouns
I've read in a number of places (e.g. Wikipedia) that Proto-Indo-European had first and second-person personal pronouns, but no third-person pronouns. Instead, a system of anaphoric demonstrative ...
2
votes
2answers
100 views
In which script(s) is the Kazakh language actually written in Kazakhstan?
According to the Wikipedia article on the Kazakh language it can be written in Cyrillic, Latin and Perso-Arabic scripts as it's a language that does not have its own native script like Armenian or ...
0
votes
1answer
28 views
Online bigram frequency lookup
For a project I would like to look up the top bigrams containing the word "like". Is there such a service available online somewhere?
0
votes
1answer
41 views
How to convert IPA into CPA (Nuance)?
I'm working on speech project where the original authors chose to use the Computer Phonetic Alphabet (CPA), from Nuance, to store phonemes.
The problem is that the dictionaries we want now to use ...
3
votes
1answer
135 views
Can words be formed by deriving from just prefix(es) and suffix(es) with no actual root morpheme between?
I was just looking at a Zulu word entry in Wiktionary that implied it was made from a prefix and a suffix, but there was nothing between them.
Now this could just be sloppy editing of Wiktionary but ...
0
votes
1answer
93 views
Grammatical constraint of language
I have a question for a machine translation exam which reads;
"Provide examples where unigram, brigram, trigram and 4-gram models would fail to capture a grammatical constraint of the English ...
3
votes
1answer
73 views
What is the relative chronology of Grimm's and Verner's Law?
I'm trying to understand the relative chronology of Grimm's Law and Verner's Law. I understand that there are different views, and that it is not easy to work out. I believe Ringe argues that the ...
5
votes
2answers
190 views
What is the relationship between syntax and semantics?
There are a number of positions you can take on what the relationship between syntax and semantics.
You could think that syntax is prior and so think that an expression's syntactic function ...
4
votes
1answer
45 views
Existing English word database with word forms?
Where can I find a database of English words that has the various forms for each word? Specifically, it would give the plural and singular form with its indefinite article for each noun, the various ...
4
votes
1answer
178 views
Why did English stop using thou?
In Shakespearean English, thou/thee/thy/thine were used for second person singular, and you/your/yours were used for second person plural. In modern English, you is used for both singular and plural. ...
