Questions tagged [historical-linguistics]
The diachronic study of language and its evolution.
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How did so many Arabic letters converge to hold the same shape?
Here one can see that the letter groups خ ح ج and several others are identical if not for the dots. In this pair, two are vaguely H-sounding, the other was formerly some form of palatalised G, which I ...
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What happened with the centum words in Bangani?
IE K^ > K has been proposed for Bangani ( http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/bangani.html ) for *g()lak^t > lOktO ‘milk’, etc. Claus Peter Zoller claimed that Bangani was related to Kashmiri,...
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Two questions about language evolution (primarily PIE and proto-nostratic)
Okay, so a little background information:
Recently I've been thinking about how quite a few languages (talking mostly about IE languages here) appear to be 'simplifying' themselves over time, getting ...
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Is there a notion of ordering the simple voice sounds a human makes in terms of difficulty, evolutionarily speaking? [closed]
I am working on a conlang amongst other things, and am trying to imagine how the stone-tool-making apes might have slowly figured out they can make certain sounds with their mouths. There's a lot to ...
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How Did the Palatovelar /*ḱ/ Consonant in PIE Become a Sibilant in Satem Languages?
In Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages (which are conveniently all Satem languages), there is a sibilant or affricate sound in places where Centum languages usually have a velar consonant. It ...
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Possible influence of Phoenician on local dialects in the British Isles during the Iron Age
I'm very interested in the possible influence of Phoenician, specifically, on local dialects in the British Isles during the Iron Age. I'm curious about any historical and linguistic evidence that may ...
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What are these "unexplained similarities" between Celtic languages and languages from North Africa?
In the section "The linguistic relationship of Welsh" from the book "Modern Welsh: a comprehensive grammar" by Gareth King we can find the following quote:
Celtic also shows
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What is the difference among root, stem and base in English word-formation? Possible answer provided to check
Is the following text correct and updated?? It is based on Bauer (1983) but I don't know if this may have changed recently. Thanks in advance!
A root is the primary lexical unit of a word which is not ...
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What happened to Aham and its derivatives in Marathi?
The Sanskrit first person pronoun अहम् (Romanized: Aham) can be found in Maharashtri Prakrit as 𑀅𑀳𑀁 (ahaṃ), 𑀅𑀳𑀅𑀁 (ahaaṃ), 𑀳𑀁 (haṃ).
It is even present in some languages derivative of ...
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What is the evidence that pre-Islamic Arabic had a plural of majesty?
I'm starting to read the Quran and I've found many theologians argue about God referring to himself in the plural, mainly claiming it is a plural of majesty (example: M. A. S. Abdel Haleem's ...
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On the effects of sound changes on case suffixes
I am working on a conlang and I came up with a question that I can't find a good answer too.
How does sound change effect suffixes, as whenever I work on conlangs with suffixes to mark different cases ...
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Is there a linguistic term for a term in a language refering to a specific technology, outliving said technology?
In language, phrases and various semantic expressions referring to technologies often make their way into the language, even if that technology is mostly obsolete.
Examples of this could include "...
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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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How implausible is it for the name "Oslo" to have come from the Semitic root w-ṣ-l instead of from Proto-Norse *ansuz + *lauhō?
I am aware that this is a controversial topic, but in a universe where around c. 500 BCE a population of Canaanite mariners did manage to set up a trading post in what is now Sweden: how plausible is ...
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How was the Turkification of the Turkish language so successfull in the last 100 years?
Atatürk established the Turkish Language Association in 1934 to study and "purify" the language. According to wikipedia this effort has been extremely successful with many loanwords no ...
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Is there any evidence for PIE *deikW- ‘feast’ to Greek deîp-?
The interpretation of Linear B de-qo-no as ‘main dinner’ and po-ro-de-qo-no as ‘pre-dinner’ would only work if PIE *deikW- ‘feast’ > deîpnon. However, it is cognate with words with -p-:
*deip- >...
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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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Why there are no grammatical cases in the French language?
As far as I know, the French language is considered as a Romance language, which is derived, in its turn, from the Latin language. The last one has a rich grammatical cases system.
I am interested to ...
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How did Otto Jespersen figure out the Great Vowel Shift?
How did Otto Jespersen figure out the Great Vowel Shift?
Surely, there were no pronunciation audio recordings available.
How did he know how British people had pronounced vowels centuries ago?
Have ...
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How did the generic masculine emerge?
In an essay for school I recently claimed the generic masculine was caused by sexism, but my teacher complained that I hadn't given a reason for this. Assuming my hypothesis is correct, how did this ...
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How to best clean a large historical corpus ridden with OCR errors
Overview:
I have a very large corpus of historical news papers (17th-20th cent.). The word count is about 20 bln. It's raw OCR-ed data in txt-files of about 150 GB. One newspaper issue per file (some ...
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At some point, was г/Г pronounced in Russian like it still is in Ukrainian (somewhat akin to h/H in hotel, i.e. /h/)? Or is it purely regional?
Recently, with a few colleagues moving into our office from Russia, we have a new resident colleague with the first name Герман. Now, being German native speaker, my assumption was that the name ...
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Inherited kinship term that is attested only in a Scandinavian dialect out of all Germanic languages
This is again a memory refreshing question.
I am looking for a specific kinship term that is considered to be inherited into a Scandinavian dialect despite the fact that no other Germanic language has ...
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The relationship between Mora-timed languages, long vowels and quantitative verse, also the status of Iranian and Balto-Slavo-Germanic?
In an anthropological forum, there was once a view that because Latin, Greek, Sanskrit (also Celtic IIRC) are Mora-timed, they are divided into one subgroup. However, "syllable-timed" ...
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Why is the proto-italic reconstruction of "corpora" "*korpezā"?
I was studying rhotacism and I came across the word corpora (plural of corpus). I would reconstruct the proto-italic form as *korpoza, but I saw the entry on Wiktionary and it says that the actual ...
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was old Mongolic similar to old Turkic
if Tungusic and Mongolic similarity is just because of adoption, are Mongolic and Turkic related (from one root). But Mongolian changed later and changed much more after Tungusic adoption.
Today ...
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Can Tungusic and Mongolic be a language family that has same root
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16qyiuz4-rFJl0W1BHbFxA2Ujv9Qp7Key/view?usp=share_link Mongolic language family book pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tGPEMAgZRqBiuFT4vJrvf41NXxlANjpg/view?usp=...
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Why do we use an upward inflection when asking questions?
I have tried Googling where the upward inflection comes from but all I get are "Valley Girl" results.
My curiosity in this started with my new German Language course I'm taking and noticed that the ...
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Are there online resources from which I can study ancient Umbrian?
Unfortunately I can not find a substantial resource that can help me in the study of ancient Umbrian. I have tried to search up on the Web, however the only resources I had found were about lexicon.
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What is the history of using the word "right" to describe something we deserve? [duplicate]
Some languages use a the same word to mean both "a fundamental right" and "the opposite of left". (English, German, French, Russian (as a calque from the German))
I am fascinated, ...
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Merger of perfect and aorist in Italic and Celtic
One of the common features of the Italic and Celtic branches is the merger of perfect and aorist. So, in the surviving "perfect" forms we find a mixture of old aorist stems and old perfect ...
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Mechanism(s) as to how the pronunciations of「也」and its Old Chinese "homophones"/phonetically-derivative glyphs drifted to the modern range of sounds?
In my question https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/47777/meaning-of-early-written-versions-of-%E5%9C%B0-and-etymology, I learned that the modern character for "earth, ground"「地」(dì) ...
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Is there a link between the words red and bread?
While this might sound random at first, I noticed that it
works in multiple languages:
Danish: brød (bread) = b + rød
German: Brot = b + rot
English: bread (spoken language) = b + red
Is this a ...
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Why is the word "war" in Romance languages predominantly of Germanic origin instead of Latin?
I wonder why in all Romance languages the word "war" ("guerra", with their multiple intonations) is a term that comes from Germanic languages, and that no modern language resembles ...
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Word form for Number in Ancient Obscure Language
The problem gives 7 numbers and 7 unmatched word forms in random order. 15, 1,16,2,10,11,14 and aina-bumfit, para-dig,bumfit,aina-dig,aina,dig,peina The question is to figure out the number peina-...
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In Classical/Biblical Hebrew, why is CHAF not considered a guttural?
According to "A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew" by Jacob Weingreen, page 19, the four gutturals are ALEF (א), HEI (ה), CHET (ח), and AYIN (ע). And gutturals make a difference as to ...
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What did the injunctive mood of Sanskrit do?
I have read that Vedic Sanskrit had five grammatical moods a verb could take; indicative, optative, imperative, subjunctive, and injunctive; four of them I understand the function of through other ...
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Historically, when was whitespace used versus interpuncts versus no-separation?
The Wikipedia article on whitespace claimed until recently that the use of whitespace as a word separator was rare until its promotion by Alcuin of York in the Carolingian Renaissance. But I've found ...
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Common origin of PIE feminine and collective plural and semantic implications
It is generally believed that the neuter nominative-accusative plural and feminine singular in PIE both originate in a common *-h2 suffix which originally marked collective, although recent works tend ...
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Why are modal verbs in English defective?
Modal verbs exist in many languages; but they are often defective. English is an extreme example where they seem to only have present tense forms; and have no gerund, participle, or infinitive; some ...
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Is Ruki sound law a Satem "Rhotacism"
Is Ruki sound law a Satem variant of "Rhotacism"
English PIE Russian
ear h₂ṓws ухо /úxo/
sear *sh₂ews- сухо /súxo/
deer *dʰéws дух /dux/
alder h₂élis- ольха /olʹxá/
their ??? тех /tex/
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How are languages classified into families?
I have heard that languages like Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French are classified as Romance languages. Languages like Dutch, German, and English are classified as Germanic languages. All of ...
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Which is the origin of Romanian /h/?
According to Wikipedia,
Romanian has [...] the glottal fricative /h/.
You can hear it, for instance, in the Romanian word arhaic.
This cannot be of Latin origin because, as explained in the book La ...
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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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Is Sanskrit the origin of every language [duplicate]
I tried to search everywhere but i couldn't find anything about my question. So i wanna ask in this site because i think this site can help me. The thing i wanna ask is Is Sanskrit the origin of all ...
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Could some European languages get phonemic vowel length in future?
Could some European languages get phonemic vowel length in future? I don't like that so few languages in Europe have that. Which would cause phonemic long vowels?
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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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Status of Nordwestblock / Ancient Belgian hypothesis
What is the status of the Nordwestblock or Ancient Belgian hypothesis right now?
This hypothesis was proposed independently by two authors in the 1960ies (Kuhn and Gysseling) and is about an ...
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What's the official term for when the verb inverts or flips its Thematic Roles?
Luke Sawczak referred to "the other way around", as switching places.
Interestingly, in English, like and please appear to have switched places at some point in the past.
"This ...
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Examples of languages that lost auxiliary verbs [duplicate]
I've been looking around and haven't found any examples of languages that at one point in the past had auxiliary verbs but then later lost them. I know that both the Germanic and Romance languages ...
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