Unanswered Questions
13
votes
2answers
329 views
How are mathematical operators like “plus” and “cos” analyzed?
Consider the mathematical statement
1 + 2 = 3
It is read in English as
One plus two equals three.
One plus two is equal to three.
In English at least, equals is obviously an ordinary ...
10
votes
0answers
184 views
Is there any language that doesn't express Tense but allows “aspectual coercion”?
Mandarin Chinese appears to be a language that may not express tense (at least in the way I will define below), and it does not seem to allow aspectual coercion.
By not expressing Tense I mean, such ...
9
votes
0answers
58 views
On the idea that Classical Chinese may *not* be direct ancestor of modern Chinese languages
It's known that Literary Chinese (or Classical; wényán ), the language of historical Chinese texts, differs completely from modern Mandarin as well as from other spoken Chinese languages, not only in ...
9
votes
0answers
76 views
Does writing influence grammar?
Do we know of any cases where the grammar of a language was influenced by the imperfection of its writing system? For example, has any language become isolating because it had a logographic writing, ...
8
votes
0answers
108 views
What is the current understanding of the classification of indigenous American languages?
Inspired by this recent question on Greenberg's classification of African languages, I wonder about the current state of classification of the American languages. (By "American" I mean the indigenous ...
8
votes
1answer
146 views
Proper terminology for the types of dual
I was reading an article about typology of Russian language by Gasparov, B. M. (“Structure of Russian language from typological point of view (Intro to sociogrammatics). Article 2. Morphology of the ...
7
votes
1answer
55 views
Dental fricatives for Brazilian Portuguese speakers
Whenever I observe my fellow Brazilian countrymen learning to speak English, a clear sound change pattern stands out:
[θ] → [f]
[ð] → [d], syllable-initial
[f], syllable-final
So, for ...
7
votes
0answers
79 views
State-of-the-art spelling correction algorithms
According to Wikipedia
The most successful algorithm to date is Andrew Golding and Dan Roth's "Winnow-based spelling correction algorithm", published in 1999, which is able to recognize about 96% ...
7
votes
0answers
205 views
Did Georgian ever have a native word for “dolphin”?
During my time in Georgia one word came to puzzle me and I'm still thinking about it:
დელფინი (delp'ini) "dolphin"
Wiktionary says this comes from Greek via Russian.
The thing is Georgia is on ...
7
votes
0answers
273 views
Which languages have zero markers of comparative degree that coexist with non-zero comparative markers?
The zero comparative marker and the non-zero one should be more or less interchangeable. (The etymology of the non-zero marker doesn't matter.)
(A message asking to list such languages was originally ...
7
votes
0answers
109 views
Linguistic research on translation evaluation
I have a background in natural language processing and machine translation, and recently I've been interested in automatic evaluation of translations.
I've read a lot of literature from the machine ...
7
votes
1answer
282 views
Relationship between SOV word order and osV prefixes
I've been reading about the Native American language isolate Washo, and looking at the Universals Archive. If an ergative language is SOV, the object and subject affixes will be prefixes and the main ...
6
votes
0answers
63 views
Which makes more more effective vocabulary practice: L1 -> L2 or L2 -> L1?
Note: Please don't assume that because I'm asking about vocabulary, that my only method of language study is vocabulary memorization.
I'm in the process of learning a couple of new languages, and am ...
6
votes
0answers
80 views
Are there sentence boundary disambiguation algorithms which can handle punctuation errors with decent accuracy?
Most algorithms for splitting text into sentences which I've found rely on punctuation being correct. However, in many real world applications, there will be substantial numbers of punctuation errors ...
6
votes
0answers
90 views
Which indigenous languages have marked Ancestral/Mythological Past in grammars?
I have found a mention on such a system among some South American native languages in Adam Jacot de Boinod's book 'I Never New There's A Word For It'.
Non-academic reading, which doesn't make it ...
