Questions tagged [cross-linguistic]
Comparisons across (as opposed to within) languages or language families.
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Cross-linguistic cases of German 'trennbare' Verbs
How many languages have verbs where you can detach a prefix and put it at the end? That's like the German 'trennbare' Verbs.
For example, in German, for depart/leave ('abfahren') you say:
Der Zug is ...
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Offensive words over time in other languages
This may or may not be true, but it's my perception of it.
In English there seems to be a phenomenon where we need a word for something that might be considered offensive, e.g. body parts, certain ...
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What do languages without a schwa vowel have in common?
This is a follow up to this answer were the OP makes the point that the schwa vowel (a.k.a. central or neutral vowel) is produced when other vowels are reduced to that sound. It makes perfect sense ...
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Is there any resource about "exceptional" examples of false cognates available?
As an amateur I lack information about specialized resources for linguists. What I’m looking for is a list of stunning examples of false cognates in any discipline, that can be either exact matches, ...
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examples for indoeuropean languages which are related to each other in different ways [closed]
I am currently writing an essay on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Family Resemblance Analogy (Philosophy of Language) and I need your help to find a neat example.
I have thought of indoeuropean languages as ...
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Genitive forms (German)
Do you know any rule how I can decide (formally), wheter a German sentence contains a Genitivus subjectivus or a Genitivus objectivus?
Example: "der Besuch des Botschafters". Here, the ambassador ...
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Languages where smells are heard
In Russian, one can use the verb слышать ([ˈslɨʂətʲ], "hear") with both sounds and smells, though it's more common to use чувствовать ([ˈt͡ɕustvəvətʲ], "feel") for smells. Example from Wiktionary:
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Linguistics concept about meaning of words according to a context
Several linguistics questions about the meaning in context of words:
How is called in linguistics the fact some words have a meaning only with other words?
How is it called when a word changes ...
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'Literally' non-literally
There has been a recent popularization over the questionable use of the word 'literally' as an intensifier rather than as a marker of non-figurative, especially since it seems to be used non-literally ...
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Transitive nouns (and adjectives) evidences from early Indo-Aryan languages
I search info and explanations about "transitive nouns", I didn't read Chomsky yet. I know he talks about "transitive nouns".
Transitivity is typically thought of as a property of verbs, and ...
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are what we translate as "adjectives", "nouns", etc, the same kind of words in no indo-european languages?
This question comes from questions in japanese SE. Keiyōshi 形容詞 are translated as adjectives. Meishi 名詞 are translated as nouns. But are they really the same kind of words that we mean with nouns, ...
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Constructions like the double accusative outside of the Ancient Greek word "διδασκειν"
I'm looking for examples of having 2 or more nouns in the same case but with the different semantic roles given by the differing referents of the nouns, not entirely by one of morphological case, ...
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Are there languages with discontinued subordinate clauses?
As for the languages I know I think to believe, that a subordinated clause comes in a chunk and not scattered throughout the main clause.
For instance:
I LIKE TO SING, while i slave away
while I ...
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How large is the number of all phonetic entities across all spoken languages?
Based on scientific (calculations in) literature, how many different "sounds" are there to be found across all languages of which the pronunciation is known?
I think tones, and a fortiori dialects, ...
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Which epenthetic sounds are most common to separate vowels?
Many languages disallow vowel-vowel sequences in a word or phrase, instead inserting an extra consonant between them to keep them apart. Some versions of English do this, like when Kennedy would say
...
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What is a small language w.r.t. the number of speakers?
What would you call a "small" or "medium" language in regards to the number of speakers? I suppose a "big" language would be Mandarin, English, Spanish, Arabic. Small would be Greenlandic or Faroese. ...
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In Arabic loanwords, why does Persian change the short vowels with different vowels instead of matching them with long counterparts?
Classical Arabic (4th-9th century) short vowels are /a/, /u/, and /i/, and long vowels are /a:/, /u:/, and /i:/.
New Persian (1000-1200 years old) short vowels are /æ/, /o/, and /e/, and long vowels ...
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Do valid sentences of phrases that have different meanings in different languages exist? How are they called?
I am aware of words that have different meanings in different languages (for example, the word "brat" means brother in many Slavic languages).
There are sentences made up from words of one language, ...
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Term for words that introduce a new sentence
I'm curious if there is a decided term for the words that begin a new utterance. They often are written with a comma following them such as below:
"Well, ..." "So, ..." but the class of these words ...
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Could the proto-human language still play a role in the interlingual communication?
I've read several studies about sound symbolism and I'm still not sure whether I got an insight into the topic. I know that today's view of most of the linguists is skeptical towards sound symbolism ...
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French Auxiliary Selection. Theoretical explanations?
I've heard that Generative Approaches trying to explain Auxiliary Selection are mostly focused in Italian, because its a language which intransitive verbs respond pretty well to unaccusativity ...
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Difference between particle and adverb in English
Some dictionaries such as Cambridge Online Dictionary defines the word particle as
a word or a part of a word that has a grammatical purpose but often has little or no meaning: In the sentence "I ...
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Which language among South East Asia has the most and least loanwords from English? [closed]
Among different languages used in Southeast Asia, which language has the most and least loanwords from English in lexicon?
In different languages, I assume Tagalog, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese.
I know ...
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Lexical similarity among languages used in Southeast Asia
Among many languages used in Southeast Asia (especially I want to talk about Malay, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Thai), is there any study about which pair of languages is close to each other in ...
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How many languages are there which use the Arabic Script, besides Arabic?
I would like to know, besides Arabic itself, how many other separate languages (not including dialects) share the same letters with Arabic? I would like to have a complete list of all such languages (...
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Question about usage of Swedish words "som" and "vem" [closed]
In the song "Jorden är ett litet rum," Eva Dahlgren sings "kvinnan som lever sitt liv i Stockholm..." Would it be correct to say "kvinnan vem lever sitt liv i Stockholm"? I ask in part because the ...
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Are there any languages in which 'knowledge' is not a mass noun?
I would have thought there would be some, but I'd love some examples. So are there any languages in which the translation of 'knowledge'is not a mass noun?
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Lexical Distance, is there a table?
I was looking (for a statistics project) to the Lexical Distance between languages and I came across this post
Worldwide map or data for linguistic distance?
I was wondering if there is any "...
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Are There Ancient Greek Words Descended From Sumerian?
Does the lexicon of Ancient Greek contain words believed to be of Sumerian origin? If so, can some estimate of their number be provided?
Thanks
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How do languages other than English form lists of words? [closed]
(Apologies if this is off-topic for Linguistics.) I'm trying to properly internationalize a web site. I have a sentence like, "You've earned badges A and B." Because the number of badges can vary, ...
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Do languages affect the focus of a society/civilization? [closed]
As I have come into contact with different languages in life I began to wonder whether some languages are more geared toward science, efficiency, literature or whatever.
It seems like certain ...
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Does "I don't drink." mean "I don't drink alcohol." in all languages? [duplicate]
In those languages I'm a bit familiar with, the verb for drinking is very often understood as drinking alcohol, especially if its meaning "the oral intake of any fluid", wouldn't make sense.
For ...
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The expressive power of languages : Information content in a sentence : How do we measure it
What is your name
Isme shoma chi e
Two sentences - same content.
My question is about the way to measure information content in a language. How do we do this? Because quite evidently count of the ...
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What is the web-searchable database of linguistic features?
Years ago, I heard of a website that allowed you to search thousands of described languages by feature, like consonant inventory and word order.
It was an acronym, and I think it had multiple W's in ...
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Distal features of wh-words cross-linguistically
My question concerns distal marking on Wh-words. Pronouns like 'this'/'here' and 'that'/'there' show clear marking of the proximal/distal distinction. Wh-words seem to exhibit some similarities to ...
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Tackling cross-linguistic vowel markedness system[at]ically: features or what?
I have been trying to find alternative ways of representing vowel phonemes for cross-linguistic comparisons in a unified, systematic way that would also reveal their relative (un)markedness. At the ...
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Chinese 3rd tone: cross-linguistic comparison
I'm wondering about the rate of occurence of complex tone contours like the Mandarin Chinese third tone, the falling-rising tone. By "complex" I mean that its contour isn't simply a rising, falling, ...
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Looking for complementary word related to "xenophobia'
The Greek-rooted word "xenophobia" is commonly used to refer to "unjustified fear of an 'other'" in English.
I'm looking some words which have related but different meanings:
"unjustified ...
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Why do many languages tend to use plural forms to impart formality or deference?
Google failed me on this. Any help?
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Why do peoples(Europe, Asia, Africa, etc) call "God" in very similar ways? [closed]
UK: dieu(the motto on passport - French)/deity(English word)
China: tien(Chinese Wade-Giles... t->d)
South Africa: modimo(o->əʊ)
New Zealand: atua(Maori... t->d)
North America: tirawa(Pawnee... w->u t-...
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Defining Linguistics
Studying Japanese, I finally broke the mindset of trying to turn Japanese phrases into English phrases. Doing this has made the study of Japanese much easier for me. Then I got to thinking, usually I ...
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Is it right that repetition in English is not so pervasive?
In Chinese, word repetition is very pervasive, for example pao lai pao qu 'run come run go'.
However, this direct translation is not good English. Does the native English speaker intend to avoid this ...
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Are there comparative studies of lexical variety in different languages?
I'm not a linguist, but really curious about how different languages measure up in terms of how many different ways of expressing the same notion they offer. For example, Chinese is definitely a more ...
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Relation between Hebrew 'סמפוניה' and English 'Symphony'
In the Mishna, it mentions a musical instrument called a 'סמפוניה', transliterated 'Simp-O-nya'.
This sounds rather like the English word symphony, which is a musical composition.
What is the ...
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What languages are writer-responsible?
It seems like every scholar since Hinds has only mentioned English as a writer-responsible language, which is also used to contrast reader-responsible languages (that are usually identified as Asian ...
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Etymology of basic numerals (number words)
When speakers of a language coin words for one, two, three, four, etc., for the first time, where do they come up with the forms?
Are there any common methods used across language families?
Pirahã ...
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Why do French/German speakers round [ð] to /z/ while Italian/Hebrew speakers round it to /d/?
More generally, what factors determine which phoneme a non-phonemic foreign sound gets rounded to in a specific language when there are multiple possibilities available? Is the choice always ...
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What is the origin and meaning of the word/name "Idora"? (Shortened)
I have been researching the word "Idora" for a couple years now in hopes of discovering the meaning as it applies to the defunct trolley park "Idora Park" formerly in Youngstown, Ohio.
"Idora Park" ...
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What languages use grammaticalized spoonerisms?
Here I define a "spoonerism" as the exchange of onset sounds between initially accented words in a phrase:
"sh(oving l)eopard" instead of "loving shepherd"
"f(ighting a l)iar" instead of "lighting a ...
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Is there a language without words which correspond to the concepts 'I', 'They', 'We'
I was wondering if a language exists without the ability to express the notions of 'I', 'We', 'they' etc.
Would it be possible to communicate without these concepts being expressible as a ...
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