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With regard to morphology a common example of a lexeme is [dog, dogs] where dogs is the plural inflexion of the lemma dog modified by the -s suffix, marking plurality. Although I can accept that dog ...

In one online linguistics community, I read the statement that "voicing is not all-or-nothing and that it is a gradient scale." This got me thinking: is this statement true or false? I guess it may be ...

There are plenty of software programs facilitating interlinear transcription (e.g. Toolbox, Fieldworks Language Explorer). There's also a number of tools that allow you to work on aligning parallel ...

Yesterday the question was raised why many languages do not share a root for 'butterfly'. When we look at the etymology of the English word, parallels are drawn to Dutch and German forms (OED): OE ...

In the article The Elusive Butterfly. Iconicity in Language (2001), William O. Beeman draws attention to the fact that most languages do not share a root for their word for butterfly. In other words, ...

Steven Pinker in "The Language Instinct" claims that there is strong psychological evidence for the existence of a sharp age cutoff for the ability to acquire a flawless foreign accent (I may dig up ...

I was wondering, what is the method (or the methods) that linguists adopt to understand and know the etymology of a word? Are these methods reliable and in what measure? The knowledge I have on the ...

The Icelandic language is often used as an example of a very conservative language, compared to other Indo-European languages, in general, and to other North-Germanic languages, in particular, all of ...

Whether a syllable has a heavy or light rime is often important in whether it will participate in phonological processes, and whether it will receive stress. For example, in Latin, stress is on the ...

A triadic model of signs can be found by various researchers. Probably the most famous illustration is the diagram in Ogden and Richards's The Meaning of Meaning (page 11, digitized here). It is also ...

Looking at the IPA, many different types of sounds are given symbols based of of the Latin R,r: approximants, trills, taps/flaps; both coronal and uvular segments. Sometimes, these sounds are ...

This question is similar to one I asked earlier about "Numbers as words". Many readability stats call for counting syllables. The direction for abbreviations and acronyms seems to be to formulate ...

I have seen two versions: a) *-ia ending actually derived from the collective number form, which also ends in *-ia. So the collective number first started to represent abstract things (compare Latin ...

A friend was asking me why there aren't any programs that can analyze a user's pronunciation of words and then give feedback/suggestions. Indeed, given an accurate phonetic transcription of a ...

The degree of literacy of a certain community of speakers is generally proposed as one of the factors that affect the pace of language change. More specifically, literacy would slow down change, since ...

I was reading about problems with the assumption of basic vocabulary in Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction: Some 'basic vocabulary' appears to change rather easily for cultural ...

What is some good software I can use for listening to speech? I would like to be able to listen to a snippet of speech over and over again, and slow it down without changing the pitch, all with a ...

Background The two common explanations for vagueness/ambiguity in language come from Zipf and Chomsky, and both seem to inherently assume that vagueness/ambiguity do not serve a positive purpose. ...

Any language has a formal variety, primarily (although not exclusively) used in writing, and one or more informal varieties, used in everyday speech. Yet, for some languages, like Norwegian and Arabic,...

The laryngeal theory proposes that Proto-Indo-European contained a number of consonants that are absent in (almost) all daughter languages. Their existence was proposed (by Saussure, under the term ...

I'm looking for examples of typological traits that are common in languages of the Americas and rare in languages elsewhere. Traits could be at any level of description — phonological, ...

Often I encounter arguments that Armenian is in fact not an Indo-European language. The claims assert that the regular correspondences between Armenian and PIE are too unrealistic, too rare and too ...

Looking at modern French in light of vulgar Latin, or Chinese compared with Proto-Sino-Tibetan (if that can even be reconstructed), there seems to be quite a few contexts in which phonemes are ...

By making a quick comparison among several language phonologies (from various language families), I could observe that some phones occur very frequently, such as [m], [p], [b], [h], [a] and [i]. ...

Over on English Language and Usage, there are many, many questions of the form "What is a single word for [phrase]". The poster usually seems to be very keen to use a single word — which may be ...

Many readability statistics ask that numbers in the text be pronounced to determine the number of syllables. What I'm struggling with is if longer numbers are considered one or more than one word. As ...

Although a much higher proportion of Japanese people understand English than people from English-speakering countries understand Japanese, it isn't as high as the Scandinavian countries. I wouldn't ...

Sometimes, I read passages like: Languages X, Y and Z in region A are closely related to each other, comparable to French, Italian and Spanish in Western Europe. The discussion in the question "Do ...

How do I isolate each of the formants in my speech? I want an easy way to hear F1-F6 for learning/demonstration purposes. I believe Peter Ladefoged mentioned a way to isolate either F1 or F2 in "A ...

Are false friends less common between distantly related languages compared to closely related languages? If so, is it merely because there's fewer words that sound similar, or is it also that when ...

In all 3 of the non-Latin-script languages I have learned to relative degrees of fluency, handwritten and printed forms differed significantly. Of course, this should not come as a surprise. Often, ...

The days of the week in English, such as Monday, are sometimes pronounced with a final -[deɪ] and sometimes with a final -[di]. For example, Merriam-Webster gives Monday as \ˈmən-(ˌ)dā, -dē\ and ...

I want to measure the quality of speech: is it higher level/lower level (vocabulary grammar etc.) and also the understandability of the speech, i.e. is the teacher using language above a student's ...

In Brazil, the Portuguese dialects spoken in rural areas preserve, despite their own innovations, several features of the language that were common in the 16th century. This phenomenon is particularly ...

Most languages have words that function as negative polarity items. Is this believed to be true of all human languages? Are there specific languages that have been plausibly claimed not to have any ...

I am a literacy researcher looking to create an add on package in R that offers quantitative methods for discourse analysis. I am creating a function for taking a chunk of text and measuring the ...

In my attempt to learn Georgian, an agglutinative language of the South Caucasus, I have learned that it has both case endings and postpositions. I also have some familiarity with Korean and Japanese ...

I'm living in an area of Tbilisi Georgia that is traditionally the ethnic Armenian area. I would like to take the opportunity to listen to people in the street to detect whether anybody is speaking ...

Many languages allow the order of adjectives compared to nouns to vary, but for different reasons: Some languages have very free word order in which case there is little difference between adj + noun ...

Some friends and I were discussing whether you could reduplicate an already reduplicated string. I came up with this rather contrived example in English to show what I'm talking about: Person A: So, ...

I just finished reading The Atoms of Language. The gist is that languages have parameters, one of which will tell you which side of a phrase to add a new word. But in some languages, like French and ...

Looking for a systematic online step-by-step process to codify English words into vowel/consontant patterns (CVC, CVCe, CVVC, etc.) and the correct sound (long-vowel, short-vowel, blend, diagraph, etc....

I have heard that the Spanish name Álvaro is of Germanic origin. So I began wondering where it might be preserved in the Germanic languages. After some thought I came up with the Scandinavian name ...

In a recent question seeking to clarify how diphthongs relate to phonemes, another term popped up in the comments, segment. This made me wonder if "segment" is some kind of synonym for either "phone" ...

The Ancient Greek had a participle for the future tense, and the only language I know it uses the future tense is Esperanto. Is there a reason why the future participle appears to be rare cross-...

It takes X seconds for the average English user to send an average-length text message via phone. What language is the most effort-intensive to text? How about to write? Is there one language that ...

Related to a question at ELU, I am interested in doing a comparative analysis of kinship terms in various languages. What would help me with this is an inventory of terms for individual languages. ...

In Mitch's answer to "What is the difference between a diphthong and a glide?" and its comments it seems more than one of us is at least a bit confused as to how many phonemes a single diphthong ...

It's easy for me to imagine the difference, but hard for me to conceptualize it. I guess one involves two vowels and the other involves a consonant, right? Am I on the right track, or is there a more ...

The sixth letter of the Georgian alphabet is ვ and all the resources I have describe it as being like English v or IPA [v]. But especially in the common word ნახვამდის (goodbye) the ვ sounds a lot ...