Questions tagged [comparative-linguistics]
A study of the relationships or correspondences between the languages that have a common origin. Formerly known as Comparative Grammar, Comparative Philology.
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Information rate of ultra-information-sparse languages
Pellegrino 2011
Also Pellegrino
YoonMi
These popular researches found out information density (ID) inversely correlates with speech rate (SR) to make information rate (IR) of languages cluster around ...
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List of counter examples + statistics of Greenberg's universal
I could not find a list of counter examples/ statistics of Greenberg's linguistic universals.
There are numbers that I could find relevant information on WALS. There are some I could not find anything....
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What are some examples of asymmetrically mutual intelligibility?
Probably most of the time, dialect >>>>> standard language than standard language > dialect.
I read about Portuguese understand Spanish more than vice versa.
Here is an answer of ...
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What language has a small difference between word length of advanced VS basic vocabulary?
word length on Swadesh list
Zipf's Law
Basic vocabulary is used more frequently and the word length (#syllables/#segments) is generally shorter than advanced/technical/formal vocabulary.
In English:
...
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Did big languages generally have a net loss of inflectional morphology in the past 1-3 millennia and small languages the other way round?
a.
R. M. W. Dixon (1998) theorizes that languages normally evolve in a cycle from fusional to analytic to agglutinative to fusional again like a clock. There are two opposing forces: one reduces ...
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Could there be another relative language of the ancient Egyptian language closer to it than the Coptic?
The standard position in Egyptology is that the ancient Egyptian language was lost and that its closest relative was the Coptic, how could this conclusion have been reached in the early period of ...
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Quantative/Statistical comparison between unequal corpora
I have created a corpus of 400.000 words, consisting exclusively of governmental administrative documents.
I am focusing on the usage of rare words and i want to prove that my corpus has increased ...
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Linguistic name for the change of meaning: 'apocalypse'in Greek New Testament meaning 'revelation' and the present use meaning 'catastrophy, etc
The first word in John's "Revelation" is a Greek word 'apokalipsis'. Yet, in modern times the word 'apocalypse' and its equivalents in many languages means 'catastrophe', 'tragedy', etc.
So ...
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Why does PIE *sneygʷʰ- ("snow") give L. nix, Gk. νίφα (acc.)?
What happens to internal /e/ and semivowel /y/ in *snéygʷʰm̥ to yield L. nix? I have no clue how that vowel change works.
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Why does PIE *ǵn̥h₁tós yield Latin nātus?
I'm an undergraduate classicist doing a PIE paper! It's absolutely fascinating, but I'm still getting there with my understanding, so apologies if my questions are a bit silly!
I have been looking at ...
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Could the initial d- in the word for tongue be originally a prefix?
I am looking for the most ancient proto-world lemmas and it seems, the word for tongue is shared by many families from over the world. Here are some selected examples:
Niger-Congo:
* Proto-Heiban: ...
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What is the origin of Marathi and Konkani case endings (specifically genitive and accusative-dative)?
In Konkani and Marathi, the genitive case ending is -च (cha) with a vowel attached to the end depending on the gender. I am curious to know the origin of this case ending.
Is there potential of a ...
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Is there any modern Indo-European languages with synthetic passive form
Which modern IE language(s) have synthetical passive form(s)? Latin did have, but it is not a modern one.
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Are any languages objectively simpler to learn than others as a native speaker?
Are there any languages which are objectively easier to learn from birth than others?
This might be broken into two parts - the spoken form, and the written form
For example, are African "click&...
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Is Etruscan zivas "to live" a borrowing from some IE language?
The Etruscan zivas looks similar to PIE *gʷih₃wós and its decendants, like Greek zōós, Latin vīvus, Proto-Italic and Proto-Hellenic *gʷīwos. Is it known to be a borrowing from an IE language?
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What's the gender of "nice" in "Mary is a nice person"?
I just read this rule in Greek Essential Grammar:
This passage says that, in the Greek sentence for "Mary is a nice person", the adjective nice is masculine because it must agree with the ...
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Is it reasonable to connect the Old Persian/Avestan word for "garden" with the Greek word?
The Old Persian/Avestan word for "garden/orchard" is bustan/bostan. On the surface, this word looks very similar to the Greek term botane, which means the same thing (and is clearly the ...
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Words for tongue in Tungusic
In Tungusic there are attested the following words for tongue:
Manchu: ilenggu
Nanai: siŋmu
Evenki: inni, čoli
Wikitionary postulates that the words ilenggu, siŋmu and inni are related and gives ...
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Uniquenesses of Hebrew
Franz Philipp Kaulen, S.J. (1827-1907)
was impressed in favor of [ancient] Hebrew by the following facts:
In no other language is there such an intimate relation between nouns and their objects;
the ...
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Is Russian the most diverged Slavic language? [closed]
Does the Russian language have more innovations and divergent development from other languages in the Slavic branch?
I am asking, because I always had the feeling, that the tense and pronunciation in ...
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How do consonant clusters originate?
I tried finding some information on this topic but there isn't a lot of information out there. The only things I could find is that it could originate from deletion of vowels between consonants. Are ...
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Could the precursor to Pre-Proto-Quechua have been a monosyllabic tonal language?
So this has been intriguing me for years:
In 'Perspectives on the Quechua-Aymara Contact Relationship and the Lexicon and Phonology of Pre-Proto-Aymara', Nicholas Emlen mentions, citing Adelaar (1986) ...
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What language is most similar to Basque?
While Basque remains firmly a language isolate and AFAIK it's origins (along with that of the Basque people) remain shrouded in mystery, I wonder if there are any languages, living or dead, that ...
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How to write a rule for total assimilation of sounds?
I am looking at this list of words; the first column is from Sanskrit, and the second is from a daughter language Prakrit.
sapta > satta
dugdha > duddha
udgāra > uggāla
tikta > titta
...
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Is there a standardized way to classify languages according to how much the order of the words is tied to the words themselves?
(I'm a language enthusiast, not a linguist, so the question is probably longer and contains more examples than it needs; maybe it could have been shorter if I had more techinical terminology at my ...
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Is Linguistic Nihilism a legitimate philosophical/linguistic position?
By Linguistic Nihilism, a subcategory of Nihilism (the position that denies value/ability/meaning/etc.), I mean the position that ...
There's A Problem: Any, all languages are inadequate for every ...
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What measures are there of similarity between languages? And where can I find data on such measurements?
Perhaps the most natural measure of similarity between two close languages is the ease with which a native speaker of one can understand the other. (This might not be symmetrical in some cases, ...
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Are the gramatical cases slowly disappearing in Romanian or they were never that used in the common speech?
Where I live in Muntenia, people rarely use the dative anymore and replace it with the preposition “la” + the nominative/accusative form of the noun or pronoun. “Am dat la băiat să mănânce” instead of ...
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Classification of kinship system by languages
I'm looking for a way to compare "closeness" of languages based on their kinship systems.
The only thing I found is this classification, which classifies kin systems to: Eskimo, Hawaiian, ...
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Questions about the "Hand of Irulegi"
The Hand of Irulegi is a recently found artifact from Navarra, Spain. It is dated in 1st c. BCE and carries an inscription touted as the oldest attestation of the Basque language.
The text can be ...
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Qualifying similarities between languages - e.g., German and Norwegian
I learnt "fluent" German and Dutch and I am learning Norwegian. German is much closer to Dutch than Norwegian. Yet, there are obvious strong and fascinating similarities between German and ...
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Etymological relationship between picture/image and education/formation
There are German words Bild (picture/image) and Bildung (education/formation).
In Russian, education is образова́ние [obrazovaniye], whilst obraz in many Slavic languages means either directly picture/...
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How to explain differences in mutual intelligibility?
Suppose language A and language B belong to the same language family. And suppose the speakers of language A understand language B a lot better than the speakers of language B understand language A. ...
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If Hebrew is not related to Slavic, why are there apparent sound correspondences?
We have
Hebrew: šeš;
Russian: šestʹ;
Ukrainian: šistʹ;
Latin: six;
English: six;
Hebrew: yeš;
Russian: yestʹ;
Ukrainian: ye, isnuye;
Latin: est;
English: is;
Hebrew: ze;
Russian: se;
Ukrainian: сe [...
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Why are telling and counting related in many languages?
In many languages, verbs for telling a story are based on or related to verbs for counting. There are (at least) three groups of such verbs:
English "recount", French "conter" and ...
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What is the subfield of linguistics that studies how different languages use different grammatical and lexical tools to put expressions together?
For example, to express possession, in English we say "I have a pen", while in Russian we say "У меня есть ручка" (lit. "A pen is near me"), while in Latin we say ...
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Request for Texts Giving an Overview of the Evolution of the Indo-Iranian Laguages
Does anyone know of any good accounts of the evolution of the Modern Indo-Iranian languages?
I'm especially interested in comparative overviews of either the entire family's historical phonology, or ...
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How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
How similar are the Ukrainian and Russian languages? For example, can I reasonably expect that anybody from Ukraine would be able to understand spoken Russian or be able to read a Russian text?
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Languages with homophonous IF-clauses
In English, most grammars tacitly or explicitly recognise two types of if. One of these introduces subordinate interrogative clauses:
I don't know [if I passed the exam].
The other introduces ...
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Is there such a thing as attributive vs. modifier uses of adj? Is un rojo carro vs. un carro rojo the same difference as 红房子 vs. 红的房子？
In teaching Spanish I often explain the difference between pre-nominal adjectives and post-nominal adjectives as the difference between an English noun phrase in which the adjective is stressed, and ...
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Latin -vus/-uus and PIE -wos
What is the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction, if there is one, of the Latin suffixes -tivus (many examples) and -vus/-uus/-ivus (arvus, residuus, cadivus)?
I read in a non-reliable source once that ...
user36730
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Quantitative methodology for contrastive pragmatics in corpus-based settings
I am interested in literature regarding methodology that could be relevant for quantitative research into differences in pragmatic meaning between two 'equivalent' concepts in two languages (in other ...
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What is a good multi language translation system for individual parts of speech such as verbs, nouns, adjectives?
I am developing a language learning tool in Python that generates dual-language books intended to be read as audio books.
The system should work by giving single word translations after every ...
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Why does purple mean red in some places?
The English word purple nowadays refers to the color that is a mixture of blue and red. This word ultimately derives from the Latin purpura which also referred to that color, so it is faithful to that ...
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Why do the Hebrew characters look so different from Greek, Latin, even Phoenician?
Why do the Hebrew characters look so different?
See, for example: chart of letters
If I look at Greek, Phoenician, etc. I can still see similarities (maybe with rotations or flipping of characters) ...
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Besides Proto-Indoeuropean, what would be the list of the 10 most acurately reconstructed Proto-languages?
Proto-Indoeuropean language (p-IE) has been the subject of study for more than 200 years, and a great deal of work has been published has been written about p-IE reconstruction. In addition, there are ...
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How Polish influenced Ukrainian
I have noticed some complexed loanwords in Ukrainian from German via Polish like the word for taste “smak”. Is it just slight influence that Polish had on Ukrainian or was it related to assimilation ...
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Is there a rule which accounts for a d in PIE becoming a b in Latin?
According to Wikitionary, the Latin word verb is derived from the Proto-Indo-European word *werdʰh₁om which is the etonym of the English word word and the German wort. I am familiar with Grimm's Law ...
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Correspondences between Mandarin and Spanish: coincidences or limitations?
I’m studying mandarin and know a little spanish. One of the things that stuck out to me in particular is that both languages sometimes draw semantic lines in very similar ways. In particular:
A) Both ...
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Perfect and Preterite
How can one communicate subtle differences in meaning that in other languages would be signaled only by the distinction of Preterite/Perfect when in fact in the language spoken there is no distinction ...
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