Questions tagged [history-of-linguistics]
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Who first said that no two words mean the exact same?
A friend of mine told me that German philologists (whom he did not name) in the 18th century were the first ones to argue that in any natural language no two words can mean exactly the same. Is this ...
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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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Is language "necessarily underspecified"?
I've read an exam question given in a class on Semantics, that was asking
Why is language necessarily underspecified
I did not find much about this at the time, which is surprising because it ...
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What exactly does the ding-dong theory of the origin of language state, according to Max Müller?
Max Müller is mentioned as one of the pioneers of the study of the origins of language, as he created a typology for the earlier origin of language theories based on the channel they draw the ...
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Seemingly discipline-wide dismissal of Linguistic Relativity and Post-Structuralism: Who still works with and supports these theories?
Many academics appear to immediately dismiss the mention of linguistic relativity/ Sapir-Whorf hypothesis because its been... supposedly debunked? I am wondering if the theory's critics offer a ...
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When was the concept of verbs' principal parts codified, and by whom?
For example, I'm wondering whether the Greek/Roman grammarians already wrote about six/four basic forms based on which a Greek/Latin verb can be conjugated in all its forms.
If they did, did they ...
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What's "Contemporary" Linguistics? What exactly is contemporary?
Academic linguistics commenced pretty recently, compared to other sciences.
So what does "Contemporary" in "Contemporary Linguistics" mean?
What exactly is signified, if a book ...
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