Questions tagged [english]
A Germanic language, which originated from England, and is considered the leading language in international communication. For non-linguistic questions about the English language, visit one of our sister sites English Language & Usage or English Language Learners.
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What characteristics are unique to English (or at least rare among language as a whole)?
After wondering about this today at work, I turned to the Internet.
A short piece that focuses on pronunciation points toward "none". I've scoured ELU and Google (perhaps not as thoroughly or ...
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Why do English transliterations of Arabic names have so many Qs in them?
I remember when the Muslim holy book was the Koran when I was in middle school, but now it's the Quran. But it's always been Qatar and Iraq (but still Kuwait.)
Who decided that 'Q' was going to be ...
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Is English tonal for some words, like "permit"?
I have heard the difference between tone and intonation described in the following way:
Tone is when the pitch of a word determines its meaning.
Intonation is when the pitch of a word conveys its ...
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Why isn't "I've" a proper response?
Suppose someone asked me the question, "Have you completed the project?". A standard response would be "I have". Why does the equivalent "I've" sound so strange and never used as a replacement?
I am ...
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Why the prevalence of "ph" in transliteration?
Why is "ph" used so often (as opposed to "f") to transliterate the Hebrew "fei" sound into English?
Examples:
Alef - 17.5 million Google hits (MGh)
Aleph - 13.8 MGh
Seraf - 0.9 MGh
Seraph - 23.4 MGh
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Why are certain there-sentences infelicitous in English?
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language states that the first three of the following four excerpts are semantically or pragmatically anomalous (to give that term some context, it cites We ...
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Why do Japanese people have difficulties in pronouncing English?
When I watch Anime, I notice that Japanese English pronunciation is really bad, they twist all the sounds, and they can't pronounce sounds like "L". I think English is the easiest language when it ...
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Is there any evidence to support the claim that English grammar is unusually straightforward?
The renowned linguist Eddie Izzard devoted at least one of his standup comedy routines to the proposition that English grammar is unusually straightforward, at least in comparison (if I recall ...
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Is future tense in English really a myth?
Does English really have two tenses - present and past? Some linguists argue that it is a Latinate fallacy to think that English has three tenses.
Some English professors and even some native ...
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Is it unusual that English uses possessive for past tense?
When learning some basic French, I was somewhat surprised to learn that phrases of the form "I have found the cat" generally translate almost word-for-word from English (J'ai trouvé le chat). To me, ...
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Why does English not have a cognate of words like heter, in Swedish, or llama, in Spanish, etc?
This is something that I think is present in most languages. If I were to present my self in English, I might say:
My name is DisplayName.
Where as in other languages I can both say:
Mitt namn ...
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English text corpus for download
I need a free English language corpus with at least 15 million words. The corpus should contain one or more plain text files. There should be no tagging, just raw text. The corpus should be free. I ...
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Why did English lose declensions while German retained them?
Why did (or more specifically what caused) English lose declensions whilst they were retained in German? I ask as I have recently been reading into the various Germanic languages and it struck me that ...
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Do absolute synonyms exist?
By absolute synonyms, I mean words (in the same language) that are interchangeable in all situations.
There can't be differences in register, meaning, or emotional value.
Is there material that ...
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When does copula absence occur in African-American Vernacular English?
In what contexts can the zero copula occur in African-American Vernacular English? What rules govern its use—for example, what makes she runnin' more likely to be acceptable than ?she a runner?
Some ...
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What are some interesting features that are common cross-linguistically but don't exist in English?
This is on purpose not a very concrete question, I simply want to know some interesting properties other languages have that English doesn't, or features you even think English ought to have, this can ...
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Is the schwa sound consistent?
The first syllable in "about" (ə'baʊt) is schwa, so is the second one in the "salad" ('sæləd), but iv'e never heard them pronounced the same way.
in salad it sounds more like the i in "trick".
...
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Are there any studies on some English passive verb constructions currently being replaced by new intransitive senses?
In the past couple of years I've noticed a new trend in younger generations of native English speakers, at least in American English and Australian English. But I can't find it discussed anywhere on ...
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Is spoken English more efficient than other languages?
Oftentimes while watching a subtitled foreign film, I find that reading the subtitles aloud (usually in my head) at the same1 pace as the speaker takes less time than what's spoken in the native ...
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What makes a non-native English speaker sound foreign?
I'm not a native speaker. However, I have tried a lot during last 10 years to learn English at a high level of proficiency and to become fluent in conversation.
However, when I talk to some of my ...
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Native English speakers: worse understanding of other accents?
In this video, Lily Tomlin (an American) doesn't really understand what Kevin Bridges is saying at all with his Scottish accent. She also says she doesn't fully understand what Chris Hemswoth (an ...
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Are Written and Spoken English distinct languages?
First of all, I am not a linguist, but I was thinking the other night that being literate was almost the same as being bilingual.
My reasoning is that sign language is distinct from written and ...
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Do dialects without the meet-meat merger neutralize the distinction in some contexts?
For many dialects of English (including my own) multiple historical lexical sets are merged into one "FLEECE" set (this diaphoneme can be represented with IPA /iː/).
I've read about the basics of the ...
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Why do Arabic names still have their meanings?
As someone born in Britain whose first language is English, but with origins in Pakistan and an understanding of both Punjabi and Arabic, it's always seemed to me that most modern Arabic names are ...
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Why did England not maintain French as a spoken language?
In many countries around the world, especially in Africa, the people natively speak both an indigenous language and French due to French colonization.
The Norman conquest of England left us with many,...
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The Origin of the Word 'God'
I originally posted this a while ago on my blog, but someone recently suggested that I pose it as a question here.
A brief Wikipedia search on the origin of the word ‘god’ reveals the following:
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Are American English and British English growing closer together or drifting further apart?
I'm mostly wondering about vocabulary (e.g. truck vs. lorry; apartment vs. flat) but I suppose I'd be interested to learn about pronunciation too. Intuitively I feel like this could go either way. ...
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What is the past tense of 'yeet'?
Yeet (/ji:t/) is a recently coined verb in English that seems to have taken on the characteristics of a strong verb, as seen in this hilarious urban dictionary definition.
In English, the strong ...
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Do non-tonal languages evolve into tonal languages?
I have read that the language in China did not always use tones or was less reliant on them. Native speakers have emphasized to me how much more compactly the same idea can be expressed in Mandarin ...
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How did Greek loanwords with 'ae' come to be pronounced [i] in modern English?
There are a bunch of Greek loanwords in English that orthographically include the vowel sequence 'ae'. Examples include:
aegis
aether
aeon
The 'ae' vowel here is pronounced [i] in English, but at ...
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What is this feature of British English called?
In British English you'll often hear them post-fixing expressions that American English tends to keep up front.
For example, I've heard British English speakers (golf commentators in particular) say ...
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What's the difference between /ɪ/ and /i(ː)/?
In English there's the vowel sound /ɪ/ as in "bin" and /i(ː)/ as in "been".
My girlfriend, who is Greek, cannot perceive the difference, but to me they sound very different.
Is the difference ...
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Do the words "angst" and "anxiety" share a common root?
The English word angst, taken from German Angst, seems to ultimately originate from Proto-Germanic *angustiz. This word has descendants in many Germanic languages, including, but not limited to, ...
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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. ...
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Unexplained /ɪl/ /ɛl/ phenomenon in American English
(I hope all this background information I’m about to give is relevant.) I’m a teenager from the north side of Chicago with a mostly unplaceable General American accent. I have some general tendencies ...
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Why does ISO 639-3 have many language codes for Arabic but only one for English?
ISO 639-3 has many language codes for Arabic, but only one for English.
I'm an Arab who is familiar with multiple Arabic dialects. We do not call it anything but "لهجات" which is translated to "...
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Can English syntax alone tell apart a person's background?
I was wondering if English syntax alone can tell apart a person's background? For example, if two strangers are exchanging texts - without looking at their spelling, word choices etc, just by the ...
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The current status of Irish Gaelic in Ireland
In addition to all the usual phonology, grammar, and vocabulary one has to learn for a new language there is the social situation, among many things when is it appropriate to speak in one register or ...
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Why IPA does not indicate "soft" consonants in English?
I am a native Russian speaker. Sometimes I encounter English speakers who are trying to learn Russian and wonder how to pronounce "soft" consonants.
At the same time while learning English I noticed ...
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Why are there inflections?
I'm from a Chinese background. I wonder why there are inflections in many languages, as compared with no inflections in Chinese. I personally suppose that a language should originate simple and easy ...
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Impossible bigrams in the English Language
Is there a list that contains every two letter combination that is not found in any English words? I have searched for a very long time and found nothing. It would also be useful if I had three letter ...
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What languages are the most similar to English?
I speak English and Bengali with similar proficiency, at least in the 'lower' registers of the languages. Since I was a small child in a bilingual home I've been struck by how, despite having ...
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How did the present continuous in English get to be such a dominant present tense?
In French if I write the sentence
Je mange le déjeuner
it would/could be the same as if I am saying I am eating lunch. What is going on in French goes on in a number of the other Romance ...
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Diachronic devoicing of initial lenis plosives in English
I get the impression that in the "classical Received Pronunciation" of English during phonetician Jones's era, the lenis plosives /b/, /d/, /g/ (and probably the affricate /dʒ/ as well) in initial ...
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Why was apostrophe so vaguely used in Early Modern English?
So I have noticed in many of Shakespeare's poems that he used apostrophes in places where we don't usually see them now.
For Example: In the poem 'Fear No More' the first line is "Fear no more the ...
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Why can "autarchy" be spelled with an "k" while other words not? [closed]
English has a set of words with "ch", coming — more or less directly — from the Greek language. They all have a /k/ sound.
character
charisma
psychology
choreography
archive
Just to name a few. All ...
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Which language is more complex, English or French? Is it even possible to objectively measure a language's complexity?
OK, so I'm a native English speaker who learned French as a teenager and I have a friend who is French and learned English as a teenager (so the opposite).
The other day he was telling me how easy ...
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Does sample text exist that includes most English sounds represented by the International Phonetic Alphabet?
My understanding of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is that it aims to provide a set of letter-based values that represent and map to fundamental sounds present in human languages.
My ...
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Why is "Aurora Borealis" from Greek, but "Aurora Australis" from Latin?
In astronomy we have the Aurora Australis in the south and the Aurora Borealis in the north. According to Wikipedia, auster is in fact the Latin equivalent of the Greek νότος, or southern wind. ...
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Why /əl/ in English sounds like [o]?
I am not a native English speaker. Recently i study some phonetics to improve my english pronunciation (and also french which i am currently studying). I noticed many words with phoneme /əl/ sound ...
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