All Questions
Tagged with romance-languages comparative-linguistics
8 questions
5
votes
1
answer
281
views
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 ...
- 151
7
votes
1
answer
2k
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Why do many French and Spanish noun cognates have opposing grammatical gender?
While most French/Spanish noun cognates share the same gender (both descending from the same vulgar latin root), there are many exceptions having opposing genders (e.g. la couleur / el color; la ...
user5306
4
votes
3
answers
5k
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Why do English, Italian, German, Spanish, French and Latin share a common alphabet and many words?
I wonder why English, Italian, German, Spanish, French and Latin share common alphabet and other words.
Also what is the relation among them.
- 159
7
votes
1
answer
664
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Why are the plural and singular first person forms of the verb "go" so different in the Romance languages?
In many Romance languages, the first person plural and singular forms are completely different:
French (aller): je vais, nous allons
Italian (andare): io vado, noi andiamo
Catalan (anar): jo vaig, ...
- 345
17
votes
1
answer
3k
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Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French number words from eleven to nineteen - history of a bizarre, inconsistent construction
Following Sklivvz's advice, I propose here a question I made in Italian Language. Because I am not sure how I should do this, I will just copy/paste the whole lot.
Let's count in Latin from one to ...
- 271
6
votes
4
answers
743
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From Italian to Spanish, consonant + "i" goes to consonant + "l"?
Why is it, that in words like plaza / piazza, or blanca / bianca, the "l" in Spanish corresponds to an "i" in Italian? Is there a preference for this kind of sound in Italian, or ...
user2146
1
vote
0
answers
228
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Do all languages with pre-positional articles have zero-articles if they don't have post-positional articles?
To clarify, pre-positional articles are the articles positioned before a noun they refer to, like English the or a(n).
Post-positional articles are those positioned after a noun they refer to, like ...
- 2,779
11
votes
3
answers
2k
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Efficient linguistic algorithms for detecting language of a website?
Some browser addons and web-services for website/dictionary translation sometimes offer a "automatic-language-detection" feature. This works more or less in my experience.
There is probably a variety ...
- 612