Questions tagged [sprachbund]
For questions about the convergence of formerly unrelated languages.
17 questions
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Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age Sprachbund
I would like to know whether there is any research on the interactions between Bronze Age languages of the Near and Middle East like Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, Persian and Hittite, in a way ...
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How common is it for languages in contact to exchange inflectional morphemes?
So languages in contact will of course borrow vocabulary from each other. And languages in contact for a really long time might converge on a common sentence structure or other morphological typology -...
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Do constructs like "going to do" and "ir a hacer" share a common origin?
I'm curious about the linguistic background between these phrases because they don't make sense word-for-word in either language, but they work almost identically. Wikipedia says that a similar form ...
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Western European languages tend to have fewer genders and simpler case systems than Eastern European ones, is this due to contact?
You can draw a relatively consistent line through Europe, to the west of which, Indo-European languages mostly have one or two genders and nouns don't inflect for case, and to the east of which, ...
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An East Asian sprachbund?
I wonder whether it makes sense to consider the east Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and potentially others) as part of a sprachbund, like the European languages in standard ...
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Does Vietnamese mười reflects the Thai/Lao/Khmer uu sound?
When I was in Vietnam I tried to pronounce the word mười (10) with the Thai/Lao/Khmer uu sound:
Thai: ◌ู
Lao:
Khmer (ou): ូ
Khmer (uə): ួ
I recognized that sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn'...
user24141
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Modern Khmer and modern Vietnamese genetic proximity
I know that Khmer and Vietnamese are considered genetically related (Austroasian language family) but I don't know what were and/or are significant commonalities to justify that consideration.
I also ...
user24141
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How Standard Average European is Modern Hebrew?
Standard Average European (SAE) is a Sprachbund centred around German and French and extending to almost all European languages. Haspelmath has examined Maltese for SAE features, but he did not ...
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Which languages have absorbed the most vocabulary from Russian, and which languages have influenced its vocabulary?
I'm a student of formal linguistics and Russian language, my question has been surprisingly hard to google -- I've studied a little Ukrainian, and I've read that its structurally similar to Russian ...
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Subtypes of Standard Average European
I was looking at a sprachbund called Standard Average European, which seems to include Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages. I will not list all the features here since they can be found on ...
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What is the etymology of Tibetan ཁང་ [khang]?
I've just discovered that ཁང་ [Wylie: khang], the Tibetan word for 'building' used as a part in many everyday vocabulary items sounds strangely familiar to the word of the same meaning in Farsi, which ...
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Are Indian languages distinct or are they just different dialects?
I speak Malayalam, one of the Indian languages and also Hindi but there are always common words which I assume are original Sanskrit words? So are the languages truly distinct or can I say they are ...
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Is syllable-timing in Indo-Aryan languages due to contact with Dravidian languages?
Most Indian languages are classified as syllable-timed. Some Dravidian languages, such as Tamil and Telugu, are mora-timed, which in recent research on speech rhythm has been called super-syllable-...
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Is a glottal stop common for vowel-initial words in Fenno-Baltic and Nordic languages?
The aforementioned languages form a certain language union, although they belong to different language families and even branches.
The languages in question are all the Scandinavic languages (...
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Is there a general tendency among East Asian languages toward simple syllable structure?
I've noticed that several languages of East Asia and the Pacific islands like Japanese, Chinese, and Hawaiian, have much stricter rules governing phonotactics than languages in other parts of the ...
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Why is the definite article in Balkan languages always called a suffix when it really seems to be part of the inflection?
The Scandinavian languages have a suffix definite article which is pretty straightforwardly tacked on to to the ends of nouns: -en, -et.
But in languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, Romanian, Bulgarian,...
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Are there other pairs of languages that are as close grammatically despite not being in the same language family as Korean and Japanese?
Though there are many theories grouping Korean and Japanese in the same family, none of these are widely accepted by linguists.
Yet the grammars of these two languages are extremely similar in many ...
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