Questions tagged [list-of-languages]
request for references of languages that satisfy the criteria set in the question.
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Are nouns ever a closed class?
For pretty much any grammatical category, I can think of a language in which it's a closed class. Japanese has closed classes of verbs and (verb-like) adjectives, for example, while Swahili has a ...
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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 ...
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Languages with nominalized verbs that specify the thematic relation of its possessor
In English, nominalized verbs have only one form regardless of the thematic relation of its possessor:
The robot's destruction (of the city) terrified authorities.
The robot's destruction (by the ...
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Comparative markers coming from low degree markers ("attenuatives")? (List such languages.)
Which languages have a marker of the comparative degree of adjectives that coincides with a marker of a low degree? ...or which has evolved from such a low degree marker?
(A message asking for the ...
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Are there any languages where the first person cannot be an object?
In some languages, nouns low on the animacy hierarchy, particularly inanimates cannot surface as A, and if a situation arises where they are underlyingly A, some reparative strategy such as a passive ...
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Are there languages that mark mood but not tense or aspect?
Are there languages where verbs inflect for mood but don't inflect for tense and aspect?
For instance, if a language had one set of indicative forms and another set of subjunctive forms, but didn't ...
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Is there a phoneme distribution graph for multiple European languages?
I am doing some research on a manuscript which I need to identify the language. My hypothesis is that it is written in phoneme by someone who does not understand the language. Spoken aloud, one that ...
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Month names variants
Regarding the question on TeX.stackexchange I am looking for generally used languages that use different cases for their month and day names.
Based on Czech and Slovak languages I can imagine two ...
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Languages with a common, productive construction for marking heterogeneous groups
Are there any languages with a construction similar in meaning to an associative plural or elliptical construction that's used frequently within the language? I'm particularly interested in a ...
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Are there written languages that commonly start direct speech without marking?
In English and many common languages nowadays, punctuation marks are used to introduce direct speech. This makes it possible to start direct speech without lexical clue, as in the second example here:
...
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Incoordination (sentence-initial equivalents of "and")
In Italian, the conjunction corresponding to "and" can be used in imperative constructions for emphatic purposes, as in:
E smettila! ('And stop!', i.e: 'Do stop!').
This is probably the outcome of ...
user21986
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Are there any languages that have words for open and closing quotation marks in speech?
It seems to me that most languages have some way of bounding quotations in written form. European languages have their apostrophe quotes and angle-brackets, while eastern Asian languages have those ...
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Are there languages without fillers like "um" or "uh"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsMWbVrjucg&t=34s
According to this video (0:55) almost every language has those speech disfluencies. But ALMOST. Do languages exist that have no such sounds for ...
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A language without consonants
I know that Rotokas language has fewer consonants than most (all?) languages. But I haven't been able to find a language that has no consonants (whether phonemic or phonetic). Does such a language ...
user30668
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Which (of the Germanic) languages support resultative constructions?
my question regards resultative constructions. Which of the Germanic languages supports resultative constructions?
It would be awesome if you could suggest any literature regarding any language. ...
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Which non-Asian languages use a single morpheme for clausal and subject/agent nominalisation?
I'm looking for languages (as many as possible :P) outside the Mainland Southeast Asia region in which there is a single morpheme performing two roles:
1) Clausal nominalisation. I will define this ...
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Is there a language that begins range expressions with the higher/later datum?
If someone were to say
There were between twenty and ten people at the event.
or
I will be there from the fifth to the second of July.
that person would sound strange indeed, because in ...
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Is there a language which would use "narrowness" or "shortness" instead of "width" and "length"?
In English, when something is big laterally, we say it's "wide", and when it's not, we say it's "narrow". This measure is called "width", and the word for it is derived ...
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Which language expresses aspect most similarly to English?
I suppose there are at least two ways to read this question (forgive me, I'm not a linguist, just a struggling practical language student):
1) Which languages' aspects map onto those in English most ...
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Differentiations between types of love in languages?
Are there any languages with distinctions between romantic, Platonic, familial, etc. love? The closest I know of is "te quiero" doesn't have the same connotations as "te amo" in ...
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Any languages beside English where one goes"back and forth" rather than "forth and back"?
Are there languages beside English in which one goes "back and forth" rather than, as is logical, "forth and back"? One typically goes "forth and back" or similarly in ...
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Are there natural languages with required, grammatical, emotional context markers?
Are there natural languages with required, grammatical, emotional context markers, such as the conlangs of:
Láadan
The language has emotional context markers. This is presumably meant to aid in the ...
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Do all languages have the subordinate clause next to the conjunction?
There are example languages for almost all the possible orderings of subject, verb and object in a simple sentence, with the order of frequency being:
SOV > SVO > VSO > VOS > OVS > OSV.
...
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Is Italian the only modern language that uses the feminine 3rd person singular pronoun for formal speech?
Is Italian the only modern language that uses the feminine 3rd person singular pronoun (Lei) for formal speech, regardless of the gender of the 2nd person singular addressee?
cf. T–V_distinction#...
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Which other languages have discontinuous dependencies and how are cross or long ones managed in them?
Discontinuous dependencies are a part of English syntatic rules and also are something which linguists are still trying to deal with.
My question: which other languages have this problem and how does ...
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Are there any languages with words for negative powers of 10 like Japanese?
In Japanese they use 分, 厘, 毛, 糸, 忽, 微, 繊, 沙, 塵, 埃 for negative powers of 10 from 10-1 to 10-10 respectively
There's also another system with a little bit different value range
https://en.wikipedia....
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Is there a language that uses some kind of second layer traits (signs of a two-dimensional character)?
I've just read about the Saussure's second primordial principle that states that language is linear. This is sometimes interpreted as the notion of one-dimensioness of language. The second dimension ...
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Must subjectless infinitives exhibit subject control when used as complements(traditionally direct objects) of other verbs?
In English, the answer will be yes in most cases, but one thesis cast doubt on this. The author provided an example taken from BNC:
My mother helped [PRO] to cater for the funeral tea, which were ...
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Are there languages without separate words for man and woman, just a generic term for both?
I am not talking about how in some languages, e.g. English, "man" is the more generic term, but languages where there is no separate word for "man" or "woman" at all. I ...
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What are some different languages that express love in a cannibalistic ways and what are their significance?
In my language, Albanian, we have phrases like "të hëngërsha zemrën" which if you translate it to English it's "(I wish) to eat the heart", which is an expression of love
I'm sure ...
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Languages or Dialects Wherein Rain/Cloud and Tear/Cry are Cognates
Are there any languages or dialects wherein
at least one of the words for rain, (rain)drop, or (rain)cloud is a cognate of at least one the terms for tear(drop) or cry(ing) ?
or (rain)clouds are ...
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Is there any program or software that translates English or any other language into Ithkuil?
Considering the absurd difficulty of this language, I was wondering if there was a program that could do this. Just for fun, nothing serious.
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Where can I obtain a comprehensive list of all languages spoken in Papua New Guinea by province?
I need a list of languages spoken in Papua New Guinea mentioned alongside the province/district/LLG they are spoken in along with the number of speakers. Where can I obtain such a list for free?
user32169
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Languages with words for "childless wife" or "childless husband"?
Are there any languages words for a "childless wife" and "childless husband"?
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Languages with words for human relationships based on the marital status of the persons related?
What languages, if any, have generic words for describing the following human relationships:
Relation of: Unmarried man Married man Unmarried woman Married woman
To:
Unmarried man ? ...
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Are there languages which have ways to distinguish between an adjunct noun and an adjective?
(Take some example). Do other languages (than English) have means distinguish between their adjunct nouns and adjectives or is it a very complex/grammatical structure that cannot possibly be ...
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Is there a most "efficient" / most "simple" / most "logical" language?
Maybe put another way: Is there an ideal spoken language for computers? One example trait would be if it rigorously follows rules.
I am in the early stages of designing code to translate written and ...
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Question about a specific grammatical feature
In one Conlang I am developing there is a feature where owned items are treated as the subject of a verb, and the owner as the Object.
So, for example:
Car sohi Amelia
Would mean Amelia's Car, with ...
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