Questions tagged [written-language]
Questions which apply solely or mostly to the written forms of languages as opposed to their spoken forms.
146
questions
10
votes
2
answers
4k
views
The reason why Semitic languages are written right to left
I have seen a video where the host said the reason why Semitic languages are written right to left is because in the old days in that region paper-like material was scarce and people usually carved ...
- 423
4
votes
0
answers
67
views
Does any language add additional speech marks to the question and exclamation mark in writing?
In English (and any other languages I've studied) we have special marks which are used to identify questions (i.e. ?) and exclamations (i.e. !).
Does any written language add additional markers to ...
- 141
2
votes
3
answers
191
views
Why is phonology part of a language, but writing isn't?
I very often see the pretense of something like "writing is not language" which I still don't quite understand.
As I understand, writing is a representation of a language, but not the ...
- 29
0
votes
1
answer
82
views
Emphasis through Capitalization
I've begun to see this style of emphasis used more frequently, like in the following passage:
People whose careers depend on the great stuff working as advertised may decide instead that they Simply ...
- 109
4
votes
1
answer
651
views
Does it make sense to study linguistics in order to research written communication?
According to this question and its answers, linguistics primarily focuses on spoken language and not written language.
This answer to another question indicates that this focus is a matter of ...
- 151
2
votes
1
answer
176
views
Why did the ancient people use different languages for speaking and writing and why don't we?
Why did the ancient people use different languages for speaking and writing? For example, in my country in 10-13th centuries people used for speaking colloquial Slavic language which evolved into ...
- 129
3
votes
1
answer
142
views
Does the concept of slang exist in cultures without established written or formal education traditions?
In English and, presumably, many of the world's other commonly spoken languages, there exists a rough category of words considered slang. This concept is not quite the same as taboo (many slang words ...
- 550
-1
votes
1
answer
113
views
Isn't it misleading to call written representations of spoken languages as written languages?
In the following sentences I would refer to anything that can be used to denote something as a symbol.
Any language uses some kind of symbol to denote different things. I presume that any language ...
- 123
3
votes
1
answer
132
views
Relationship of spoken and written language and truth of sentences
I am not entirely sure if this is the appropriate site and whether these are the appropriate tags for this topic, so if that is not the case, please feel free to let me know.
I never thought twice ...
- 31
0
votes
1
answer
52
views
I need help with searching a corpus for a complex sentence
I am trying to formulate a search request that will show me example sentences for sentences that contain the phrase "In the beginning" or "At the beginning" followed by the word &...
- 11
0
votes
0
answers
17
views
Term for an uninterrupted turn without any overlap
Is there a term in Conversational Analysis for a turn that is completely uninterrupted by another speaker? That is, Speaker 1 produces an entire turn, then Speaker 2 produces an entire turn, then ...
- 576
4
votes
1
answer
112
views
Ways of classifying writing systems by appearance?
Are there any common groupings of writing systems by grapheme appearance? I'm currently writing about language identification and one specific goal I have as part of the work is to include steps for ...
- 141
3
votes
0
answers
113
views
Do English words have a sort of de-facto inherrent gender (or gender stereotype) to them?
I apologize in advance if this question goes all over the place, I was just randomly thinking today about gender in the English language.
One thing in English that I find is overlooked is gender in ...
- 149
4
votes
1
answer
1k
views
Beta vs eszett character difference
How to write the Greek letter beta and the German letter eszett so that they look different enough?
I've seen variants of beta with the final arc ending on the vertical line and ones which have a ...
- 143
3
votes
2
answers
483
views
Books on historical writing systems
Can you recommend books on the writing systems that are not widely used today (e.g. the Germanic runes, the Old Turkic script)?
- 39
0
votes
1
answer
139
views
Boustrophedon-like writing system with single character orientation
Did a writing system ever develop that had a bi-directional writing style, alternating every line, with character orientation and order being preserved between lines? (Essentially Boustrophedon, ...
- 105
18
votes
4
answers
6k
views
Why were writing systems invented independently during roughly the same period across multiple civilizations?
Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years, and spoken language is believed to have been around for 50,000 to 150,000 years.
Writing is a relatively new phenomenon. According to this source, ...
- 587
-1
votes
2
answers
171
views
Which language has the most distinct written and spoken forms?
I know about Persian as an example.
For example, we have "خانه" (transliterated as Khaneh, which means home) for the written form. But we say "خونه" (Khooneh) for the spoken form ...
- 153
1
vote
1
answer
266
views
Prevalence of Western/Latin Arabic numerals (digits 0-9) in cultures using the Hindu-Arabic Numeral System?
How prevalent is the use of Western/Latin Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, hereafter referred to as Latin digits)† as the primary means of symbolically manipulating numeric ideograms in ...
- 119
3
votes
2
answers
309
views
Tabannusi in cuneiform script
I'd like to know how to correctly write a word "tabannusi" (build) in sumerian alphabet. Is there a chance then anyone can help me?
-1
votes
2
answers
323
views
Are there any languages that don't "fit" on a keyboard?
The standard QWERTY keyboard has keys for all the letters in English, and also numbers, symbols and a few punctuation marks.
Other languages, such as French, might have diacritics in their spelling. ...
- 143
25
votes
3
answers
4k
views
Can Someone Identify This Diacritic?
My mother is working on genealogy and has run across a diacritic mark that I could swear I've seen before but cannot identify. Here is the last name (said to be Austrian) from two documents. It's the ...
- 483
14
votes
5
answers
4k
views
Are there languages where a change of character casing can lead to a different meaning of a word?
I'm no expert on linguistics. In fact I'm no even a proper amateur but please, bear with me on this: Are there any languages where a word would change its meaning depending on the casing of one or ...
- 243
1
vote
1
answer
75
views
What is the technical term for the copyist error of replacing a letter with another, similar-looking letter?
One form of textual criticism (which is under the branch of corpus linguistics) is arguing that a text was mistakenly copied by a copyist to reflect an erroneous reading. An example of this is that ...
6
votes
4
answers
2k
views
Can a natural language be non-serializable?
Typically, a serializable language can be expressed by strings.
Can a natural language be non-serializable?
Fictional source which motivated me to ask this question: a character in C. Stross' novel "...
- 195
3
votes
1
answer
101
views
Searching for an English Whats-app Corpus
I am searching an English Whats-app Corpus in order to analyse a linguistic phenomena. I had some difficulties to find one and maybe some of you can help me out. It is only for corpus driven study and ...
- 82
0
votes
3
answers
246
views
Some “linguistic formulas” to translate French texts into English?
I am not sure is it correct to ask my question here or not!
I've asked this question here (in MathStackExchange) before!
Maybe it is better to see the question there, because it was written ...
- 119
1
vote
2
answers
287
views
Are there differences in writing among Arabic dialects?
I am currently looking for text data in Arabic. However, for this I need to know whether there exist some significant differences among dialects in its written form.
Surely, dialects very likely ...
- 121
3
votes
2
answers
1k
views
How do you break words across lines in Arabic?
I have been searching for this for a few hours today and haven't found anything but this really, well maybe this is as close as it gets. Just found this, too, which is nice.
I've asked this on the ...
- 4,198
21
votes
9
answers
5k
views
Languages which changed their writing direction
I am interested in account of languages that had undergone a change in the writing direction somewhere in the history.
We might say, for example, that Greek was used to be written also (not sure if ...
- 331
4
votes
1
answer
245
views
Estimating the number of words in a language before invention of alphabet
Here is my question from the title:
Given a (natural) language with its writing system based on an
alphabet, are there any theories giving (quantitative) estimates on
the number of words the ...
- 143
0
votes
2
answers
339
views
Conventions on sorting phrases with whitespace and punctuation (for an index)
I'm sorry if this is not the correct community to ask this question, if not please suggest a transfer.
I'm compiling an index of sorts for a large songbook where all the titles and first lines of the ...
- 103
4
votes
0
answers
107
views
How and why do languages evolve to use different types of quotation marks?
For example, English uses "...", but French uses «...».
Also, which of these is more common? What did the first written languages use?
- 363
7
votes
4
answers
1k
views
Is a text with orthographic or grammatic mistakes in a language X still a text in that language X?
Let us suppose that we have a text that in its majority follows the orthographic or grammatical rules of a language X, but 10% of the words have orthographic mistakes, and 10% of the sentences have ...
- 143
5
votes
0
answers
91
views
Are there studies which attempt to quantify the information conveyed by written languages - especially Japanese/Chinese?
I'm curious as to whether anyone has attempted to come up with a quantitative measure of information conveyed by written words, symbols or graphs, and particularly curious if anyone has studied ...
- 1,270
0
votes
3
answers
436
views
Alphabet size affects complexity of written ideas?
Do relatively simple alphabets (Rotokas, Hawaiian) limit the complexity of written ideas? Example: could Rotokas be used to write a technical manual for the space shuttle?
- 11
35
votes
2
answers
13k
views
Why is “ß” not used in Swiss German?
What are some of the historical reasons why the orthographic symbol ß is not used in Swiss Standard German and “ss” is used instead?
- 313
-1
votes
2
answers
117
views
Do any languages allow merging of two sentences without punctuation?
I teach some students who are not native English speakers and commonly make this mistake in their writing: They often combine two complete sentences without any punctuation or break between them.
...
- 673
3
votes
2
answers
904
views
What language(s) should I learn to read the Epic of Gilgamesh?
I wasn't sure where to ask this question. I hope this is the right place...
My question is a little more complicated than the title suggests.
I'm wanting to read the Epic of Gilgamesh in the ...
- 141
-1
votes
1
answer
64
views
What are all of the possible punctuation that are used within words in the majority of languages?
I know it's potentially a bit of an odd question, but I am working on an app that needs to analyze text that can be written in any of the most common languages. What I need to know is what punctuation/...
- 11
9
votes
1
answer
223
views
Does (or should) the terms "spoken language" and "speech" include signed language?
And if not, is there a term, accepted by both the Deaf and linguistic communities, that includes both spoken and signed language, in contrast to written language?
Reputable linguistic sources, ...
- 91
2
votes
0
answers
190
views
Ontology of logogram, pictogram and ideogram
Is it fair to say that a pictograms are a subset of ideograms which are a subset of logograms?
What is an example of an ideogram that is not a logogram or pictogram?
- 123
3
votes
2
answers
4k
views
If there is a pattern to Chinese characters
Many people say that written Chinese is a difficult language to learn because the characters don't have any relation to the sound of the word, like in English and other languages, even Japanese. But I'...
- 4,198
-2
votes
1
answer
271
views
Does a written language exist with 1 symbol for every word?
We could create a dense written language with 1 symbol for every word.
Lets say that it is read by a computer aloud or translated into normal language.(Like a QR code)
I know that QR code does ...
- 1
0
votes
1
answer
226
views
The reason some languages write down the accents while others don't
This may be a difficult question to answer but I'm curious as to the reason for this.
The word película in Spanish is pe-LEE-cu-la. It has an accent to mark how to say the word.
The word peninsula ...
- 4,198
2
votes
1
answer
660
views
Do any languages not have the concept of "words"?
I'm wondering if there are any languages that are basically just streams of basic sound blocks, like letters or syllables, and they don't have words.
- 4,198
0
votes
1
answer
223
views
Is punctuation necessary in written language?
I'm wondering if punctuation is necessary for written languages. I can't quite tell if in spoken languages we use "punctuation". It seems like "we say multiple words without pauses, breaks, or other ...
- 4,198
3
votes
0
answers
163
views
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:
...
- 3,768
-1
votes
1
answer
136
views
Is ending a sentence with a possessive considered informal? [closed]
Does corpora show any genre preferences for ending sentences with a nominal possessive? Does it occur more in spoken and informal written texts than in academic texts?
I really appreciate your input.
- 1
4
votes
3
answers
353
views
Is capitalization a recurring feature across writing systems?
Is it a common feature for a writing system to include a capitalized variant of itself?
What is the purpose of capitalization in itself? Is it ever truly necessary for comprehension?
- 137