Questions tagged [words]
a word is the smallest element that can be uttered in isolation with objective or practical meaning.
112 questions
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Why does it seem the letter خ is the only consonant that precedes an unpronounced و in Persian?
In Persian I know 10 letters that in them, خ precedes an unpronounced و:
خواب (khab) which means sleep.
خواجه (khajeh) which means eunuch.
خوار (khar) which means humiliated.
خوارَزم (kharazm) which ...
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Is there a name for when someone tries to feign their statement had no specific meaning? [closed]
I often find myself in conversations with one friend in particular who says things and later denies that they had a specific meaning.
As an example consider two friends who get lost in the woods. One ...
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What are all the ways to formulate a word?
Consider the formula according to which Sanskrit and most Indo-European languages formulate the word:
[prefix] root + suffix + ending.
And now consider the formula according to which Semitic languages ...
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Is it possible to define a concrete object with language clearly and accurately?
How do we know whether counterexamples of a concept are infinite or finite? Is there an end to the process of revision?
It is usually claimed that defining a concept clearly and accurately is almost ...
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Classifying word class of "where" in "They've got this big board near the entrance where they list the trials"
in "They've got this big board near the entrance where they list the trials", I think "where" is a preposition since it's providing additional information about the location of the ...
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Is 'will' always volitional, and if not, how can we distinguish action verbs as volitional or non-volitional?
Etymologically, will as a verb means: "to wish, desire; be willing; be used to; be about to" (past tense wolde), from Proto-Germanic *willjan (source also of Old Saxon willian, Old Norse ...
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What is the name of the first known word from which the current word is derived?
I'm interested in the name of the concept that defines the word from which another word comes.
For example, "Guild" comes from the German "Gilde". What is the name of the word &...
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Why don't currently spoken languages have words for everything they encounter?
I have been getting translations of what I would consider are fairly basic words, into various languages, and have found some don't have translations and they either make up a translation on the spot (...
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What exactly is meant by "part of speech" (POS) in linguistics and NLP?
I am learning about Arabic word morphology, and ChatGPT lead me to this which says:
In Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a complete part-of-speech tag set has over 300,000 tags (whereas English has about ...
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How did خشاب become the Persian word for magazine?
In Iran magazine (in a gun) is called خشاب (kheshab). I tried to find a relation to another language but I failed.
The only thing I found is that خشب (khashb) means wood in Arabic.
In Arabic magazine ...
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Is there a list of word meanings that are universally represented in all languages?
I am looking for a comprehensive list of words/concepts that are represented in most if not all known languages - presumably the category would include human body parts (hand, foot, mouth, eye), ...
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All the ways you can describe a relationship outside of nouns/verbs/adjectives across languages (i.e. like with prepositions)? [closed]
Having dug more into prepositions, I learned they are often "function words" (as opposed to "lexical words", i.e. "content words"). However, in at least one paper I read (...
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Why words are the basic building blocks of language?
I'm asking this both in the sense that for me (as a human) words seem to be the fundamental building blocks of language, and from the perspective of NLP applications, where word-vectors and word-...
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Do some languages use lexical stress to differentiate words with unrelated meanings?
In English, lexical stress is occasionally used to differentiate words with the same consonant and vowel phonemes and that have related meanings. (Please forgive the incomplete definitions.)
re ˈpeat ...
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In agglutinative languages with long "sentence words", how do they conceptualize of these "words" and their parts?
I asked a similar question on languages with "small words": In languages with "small words", how do they conceptualize of these units?
How do agglutinative languages with long, &...
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In languages with "small words", how do they conceptualize of these units?
The languages I am thinking of are Vietnamese and Tibetan, but perhaps there are others. And I know that technically these two are classified on the opposite of the spectrum (analytic vs. ...
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Does a sound denote a thing and a word denote that sound or a word denote a thing a sound denote that word?
Recently, I picked up a book on mathematics that highlighted the importance of distinguishing between a word and what it represents. Now, if only words and things that they denote were involved in ...
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Ways a word can be used
Does anyone know if there is a name to refer to the way a word is used in a sentence to either stand for its meaning or to refer to the word itself in some manner. For example:
Orange
I ate an orange....
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Corporeal - spelling over time [closed]
Note the English phrase 'Corporal Punishment'. I suspect that it is a spelling corruption of Corporeal. I haven't been able to find any information on this online.
Is this just a rule of spelling I'm ...
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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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Do any languages treat conjunctions as nouns or verbs or such things?
Similar to What other languages can get by in some cases without prepositions or particles like Somali?, I am wondering how we can boil everything down to just nouns and verbs (maybe adjectives, or at ...
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Why are "eat" and "drink" different words in languages?
In theory, the words "eat" and "drink" are fundamentally the same action to me: putting something (...edible?) in your mouth. Oftentimes when speaking English, I confuse the words &...
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Difference between polysemes and senses
As far as I understand, saying that two words are polysemes is saying they're synonymous homonyms, but not synonymous enough to be the same word. Senses on the other hand, are synonymous enough to be ...
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Do any languages do without the word for "this" (or "that"), or treat them somehow as nouns/verbs/adjectives?
A lot of words are defined in terms of "this", such as "here: this place". But "this" can be a pronoun ("is this your bag?") or determiner ("don't listen ...
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When do you go from morpheme to word to sentence in agglutinative languages?
I am working on a cross-language dictionary for fun (i.e. every language), and have been refining this idea of "terms" (as described in that link) for a while. A term is basically anything ...
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What are lexeme, word and phrase in HPSG?
In “Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar: The handbook” by Abeillé and Borsley, it says:
lexeme, word, and phrase have a complex system of subtypes. The type lexical-sign, its subtypes, and the ...
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Is there a term for
I understand what phrase, clause and sentence mean. But is there a term for a group of words with a clear beginning and end, regardless of whether it's a phrase, clause or sentence?
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How do speakers of languages which can form arbitrary long words deal with long words? [closed]
Looking at this long word list and coming from this conlang question, I am wondering how languages which allow for arbitrarily long words (I don't know for sure, but agglutinative languages, or German,...
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How do natural languages prevent word ambiguity in "compound words"?
So for context, I am occasionally working on a sort of conlang, and asked this question just recently: How to create words which will be unambiguously parsable in a conlang? In there I run into the ...
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What is a word?
The way I see it, a word could be conceptualized as different sets. I'll list them below.
Word as a singleton set: { to jump }
Word as a set of all its inflections: { to jump, jumps, jumped, jumping, ...
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Do any languages treat "locative" words as more than suffixes or prepositions?
I am working on a conlang and wondering if there is any different way to deal with these "locative" words than either prepositions or prefixes/suffixes. That is, words like "in", &...
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Do any languages provide markers or particles or the like for marking compound terms?
Considering How do you denote compound nouns and verbs in Chinese?, and the linked What is an example of 3 or 4 word compound verbs?, and working on a sort of intermediate language, I am wondering how ...
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How do we shape our language's lexicon?
Society always drops, creates and re-uses words. But how does that happen? When do we get to decide what word to use, dump, or create, and in what method does that occur? Does someone invent a new ...
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Can someone explain to me the Zipf–Mandelbrot law?
I really can't understand. It's about linguistics and I can't understand anything because there are mathematical formulas in it that I can't understand at all. Can anyone explain this with ...
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Longest word in all languages [closed]
https://www.google.com/search?q=longest+word+in+all+languages&sxsrf=AOaemvKcePJS8wsKGqzL_U6e1NC7gQvzAg%3A1631976735337&source=hp&ei=H_1FYe7REZDn-QaKqY6ACQ&oq=longest+word+in+all+la&...
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Is 😂 a word/letter?
Can "😂" (the Face with Tears of Joy emoji) be technically considered a word, from a linguistic point of view?
Obviously, emoji are different from "ordinary" words, but:
"😂&...
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Are different inflectional forms of a word different words or the same word?
At some point, I gained the notion that inflections of a word didn't constitute different words, but rather different forms of the same word. This Wikipedia article however, says the process of ...
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Terms for abbreviations
Is there a specific distinguishing word for abbreviations that have evolved to be spoken words in their own right, like potus or Nato, sometimes even an "abbreviation word" with a clear ...
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What are some good books on word formation and semantics? [closed]
I have been trying to find an accessible book for the general reader that focuses particularly on questions like:
How words are created? (morphology, etymology, popular PIE roots etc.)
How words ...
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Dataset for distribution of different systems for 'yes' and 'no' cross-linguistically?
The Wikipedia article for 'Yes and no' lists various distinct, common, systems for expressing the affirmative and the negative, ranging from no explicit terms (instead relying on echo responses) to ...
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Is there a word for the opposite of jargon? [closed]
I've noticed this phenomenon in language which I've come to think of as "the opposite of jargon", but which I'm hoping there's a better name for. I don't know anything about linguistics, ...
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What are the minimum number of words needed to express any complex thought?
Most of the words in English are just quicker ways to express things that otherwise needs many words to describe. So, what is the minimum number of words or smallest dictionary that one can use to ...
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"Matter" and "What Matters"; "Substance" and "Of Substance"
This thought is directed at those who have an interest in the deeper meaning of language and how it connects to our perspective of reality. Perhaps a bit philosophical. If this is not the proper place,...
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In what century did people start using the word "profession"?
I need to find out in what century the word "profession" appeared.
My final goal: to understand whether this word could be used in the Middle Ages in everyday communication, in the meaning ...
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Are the longest German and Turkish words really single words?
First, I don't speak/understand any so-called agglutinative languages, like Turkish. I also don't know German.
I understand there's no good definition for the concept of "word", which could ...
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Is an unambiguous description of left and right side of the body available in some languages
The nautical terms "port and starboard" refer to the left and right side of a vessel when looking from the stern to the bow. At first it seems silly, but, it's actually great to ...
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Is this phrase or clause a clause?
Is "lefty loosey, righty tighty" a clause?
Or what is "lefty loosey, righty tighty"?
Or what part of speech is "lefty loosey, righty tighty"?
Or what part of speech is ...
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What are the essential words?
Take a dictionary. Each word is defined using other words. Take all the words of the dictionary. The words that appear in their definitions is a subset of words of this dictionary (and not the whole ...
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Where online can I find a list of all the Hapax Legomena in the Hebrew Bible?
I am looking for a list online of all Hapax Legomena in the Hebrew Bible in text format that I can copy and paste into MS Word for further studies.
I need something that's free and is not in a picture ...
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How do novel words form? Do they exist?
How do novel words form? Do they exist?
Some ideas about word forming here:
https://www.thoughtco.com/where-do-new-words-come-from-1692700
But I was particularly interested, is it possible that one ...
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