All Questions
8,778
questions
1
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0answers
23 views
What do you call the range of possible subjects a word can be predicated of
What do you call the range of possible subjects a word can be predicated of?
i.e., brown can be predicated of furniture but not numbers; running can be predicated of people but not rocks; fruitless ...
22
votes
3answers
5k views
Why do some Indo-European languages have genders and some don't?
In some languages, like German and French, every noun has a gender and each gender has its article. Whereas languages like English and Persian do not have genders. Why is that?
Even though these ...
3
votes
2answers
102 views
Aspiration versus C+h cluster
Since there are languages with consonant clusters and languages with aspirated consonants, in principle there could be a language that has a surface contrast between [Ch] and [Cʰ]. Word-internally it ...
1
vote
0answers
109 views
Are Russian words пять (five), пясть (fist), пятка (heel) related? What about English “fist”?
I wonder whether the PIE word for five in fact meant "fist", in other words, when people counted, they closed their fingers and when they obtained the closed fist, it was "five"?
...
0
votes
2answers
103 views
What is the difference between a glide and a semivowel?
Is the following distinction made by this university lesson between glides and semivowels standard?:
Glides include speech sounds where the airstream is frictionless and is modified by the position ...
1
vote
1answer
71 views
Phonetic vs phonological consonants: What is the difference?
I come across such distinctions in quite a few places such as in this Wikipedia article, Voiceless glottal fricative, where it states: "The voiceless glottal fricative, sometimes called voiceless ...
0
votes
0answers
24 views
Guessing phoneme duration for english words
Is there an existing method or dataset, which, given just a word in English (no context), could give a best guess as to how long to make each phoneme when recreating it as speech? Obviously the true ...
3
votes
1answer
167 views
Why is six and seven so similar in many languages?
Six (English) = Sechs (German) = Seis (Spanish) = Shesh (Hebrew) = Sita (Arabic) = Shest (Russian)
Seven = Sieben = Siete = Sheva = Sabaa (~= Sem in Russian).
So Germanic, Latin, Sematic and perhaps ...
0
votes
2answers
111 views
Why is Proto-Germanic long i /iː/ reconstructed as “ī”?
I know that Gothic has "a large number of archaic features".
I know that Gothic writes Proto-Germanic (PGmc) "ī" /iː/ as "ei". wīną wein, swīną swein
I know that Gothic ...
0
votes
0answers
75 views
What is the mutual intelligibility between the Standard German and Hessisch?
If a native Standard German speaker from Leipzig listens to Hessisch spoken by an elderly person from Lich(a small town in Hessen), will he/she understand it?
1
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0answers
33 views
Semantical and functional morphemes
I have this idea in my head that when it comes to morphemes, there are two divisions at the top: "semantical morphemes" and "functional morphemes". Semantical morphemes are those ...
8
votes
2answers
4k views
Is modern English the most spoken language of all time?
Out of all of the people that have ever lived, did/do more of them speak modern English than any other language? There are 2 billion English speakers alive today, but in my brief search I wasn't able ...
1
vote
0answers
65 views
What is the etymological difference bewteen ب ر ك and ص ل و roots?
The roots ب ر ك (BRK) and ص ل و (ṢLW) shares a common meaning related to the act of blessing.
Is the first one related to the knees, while the later one is rather connected to the notion of eulogy?
(...
1
vote
0answers
87 views
What are the descendants of the PIE suffix “-n̥kʷos” in the Czech language if there are any?
Me and my friend would like to know whether there is any PIE suffix "-n̥kʷos" descendats in the czech language, we feel like "-uha" in "ostruha" could be it, in other ...
0
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0answers
75 views
How is a language's classification decided upon ? (or modified)
If a new language is discovered or if a study shows that a certain language should be reclassified, is there a committee(s) that decides on this ? (who ?)
1
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0answers
52 views
Case Study: Classifying the origin of a word
Let's say we have a Country 'A' that spoke a Language 'A'.
In Language 'A' (LA) they had the word "Shamish" (IPA: /ʃamɪʃ/)
A Language 'X' (LX) is gaining ground in Country 'A' and they have ...
1
vote
1answer
67 views
Is this Wikipedia Arabic dialects map correct about Badawi Arabic, and what is Badawi Arabic?
This map is from Wikipedia's Varieties of Arabic page. On the northern half of the western Red Sea coast, as well as most of Sinai and Israel, it seems to indicate that "Badawi" Arabic is ...
0
votes
0answers
119 views
ValueError: Can not squeeze dim[1], expected a dimension of 1
I want to buil a sequential LSTM model that predicts binary classification at every time step. More exactly, I want to predict an output for every paragraph in my texts (48 is the number of paragraphs)...
4
votes
2answers
124 views
NP or DP for “that book”
When referring to phrases such as "that book", would it be considered a DP or a NP? I think it should be considered as a DP but I am not sure how to prove it using our given data. Some data ...
0
votes
0answers
41 views
A question about argument structure of see, watch, look
According to Kearns(2011), verbs like peer, gawk, spot, scan, sight, study, glare, eye, glance, observe, peep, stare, examine, glimpse, etc. can be categorized into "see" class, "watch&...
0
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0answers
25 views
Questions about identifying the thematic roles
I'm still not confident about whether I've totally understood thematic roles. Can you help me see whether these thematic roles are correct? Thank you in advance!
a.[Hilda] slung [the case] [overboard]....
0
votes
1answer
115 views
Can Greek form other compound words like “Hyperborea”?
In Greek mythology, the Hyperboreans were a race of giants that lived in a sort of paradise, where the sun shone constantly and everyone was perfectly happy. The land was supposedly located so far to ...
1
vote
2answers
155 views
Why are the names of languages always adjectives? (e.g. “English”, “French”, “Spanish”)
I notice that in English (as well as Spanish, and perhaps other European languages), the name of a language is the same word as the adjective form of the country or region name.
In English, this rule ...
8
votes
2answers
2k views
Why are mixed languages so rare?
It seems to be an established fact that mixed languages are rare, and that most languages can be classified as belonging to some family. And this seems to be true; for example, in the former ...
1
vote
0answers
32 views
Corpus of Taboo card game?
Has anyone constructed a corpus of people playing the card game Taboo, in a purely text-based setting, like a computer chat, rather than face-to-face with audio or video? The closest I've found are ...
1
vote
1answer
78 views
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 ...
3
votes
1answer
98 views
Is most of the world's languages being in a small number of families a recent development? Or has there always been cycles of linguistic expansion?
I've always found it curious that the languages spoken by an overwhelming proportion of the human population can be traced to a small number of proto-languages that were each spoken by only a small ...
0
votes
0answers
22 views
Terms for root stress
Looking for some descriptive help for a language description project. Stress assignment in the language is fairly complex and pretty resistant to easy generalizations, although prominence is ...
0
votes
2answers
92 views
The similarities between English “very” and Talish “ver”
Talysh is a "vulnerable" northwestern Iranian language. There's this word "ver" in this language which means something like "of high quantity" which is quite similar to ...
0
votes
0answers
32 views
Are voiced true nasal fricatives the same as breathy nasal stops?
True nasal fricatives, formerly known as nareal fricatives, are fricatives whose airflow is only through the nasal cavity. In extIPA, they are notated by [ ͋], e.g. [m͋].
That would mean the mouth is ...
2
votes
1answer
52 views
Latin suffixes -or and -idus, is there a correspondence?
In Latin (and daughter languages), there seems to be a correspondence between nouns of the third declension in -or/-us, -oris denoting a quality, and adjectives of the Ist class in -idus,a,um denoting ...
2
votes
3answers
197 views
How did verb conjugation by person, number and gender appear? Why do we still use it?
I'm Russian native,learning German and English. I'm interested in teaching myself some linguistics.
Russian verb inflects for person, number in present and future tense; for gender in past tense.
...
3
votes
0answers
38 views
Is there a grammar of Middle Tamil?
I am studying the Thiruppavai, a Middle Tamil poem, as a linguist and I wondered if any of you by any chance know of resources pertaining the grammar of Middle Tamil. Overviews of the history of Tamil ...
0
votes
1answer
105 views
Classification of Languages
I have heard that languages like Portuguese and French are classified as Romance languages. Languages like Dutch and German are classified as Germanic languages. All of the Scandinavian languages ...
0
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0answers
68 views
Does “this” and “these” belong to the same lexeme?
I am confused as to whether "this" and "these" belong to the same lexeme
3
votes
0answers
57 views
Differences in realization of intrusive-r and linking-r?
Are there any good papers that have investigated this? I seemed to notice this with some speakers on television that their intrusive-r's seemed less pronounced than their linking-r's.
I did find a ...
1
vote
0answers
45 views
Kayne on Conjunctions and Chomsky's Labelling Algorithm
I'm reading on coordination structures in relation to Chomsky's proposal of the Labelling Algorithm and stumbled upon Kayne (1994) The Antisymmetry of Syntax. In it, Kayne takes the view that ...
0
votes
0answers
62 views
Does any Sanskrit noun stem end in e ए?
Sanskrit nouns stems ending in dipthongs are very rare but I could still find examples of at least one stem each ending in every dipthong except e ए.
ऐ ai - रै rai
ओ o - गो go
औ au - नौ nau
But I ...
0
votes
2answers
97 views
“It is ___ that/who + verb.” pleonasm vs. “___ + verb.”
Is there a name for the following type of pleonasm:
"It is John who runs." (instead of: "John runs.")
"It was congress that legislated." (instead of: "Congress ...
4
votes
0answers
94 views
What kind of syntax diagrams are these, found in a book on legal writing?
These don't look like syntax trees in undergrad linguistics syntax textbooks. Do linguists use these diagrams? What are they called?
Page 343.
Diagrams for grammatical analysis are visual aids to ...
1
vote
1answer
114 views
Is there a reason for language names only sometimes corresponding with the word for people who live there or people who speak that language?
Some language names are also the names of the people who speak that language, for example Russian, Norwegian, Italian, and German. But others are not, for example Dutch, French, English, and Spanish. ...
0
votes
1answer
68 views
Languages with overt determiners AND pronouns/proper nouns
I am currently performing a cross-linguistic investigation of determiner phrases, and I was wondering if there are languages out there where an overt determiner can occur with a pronoun or proper noun,...
1
vote
0answers
31 views
How would you label an aspectual suffix that indicates that an action has stopped or become static?
This suffix seems to behave as the opposite of an inceptive suffix (which indicates that an action has begun).
3SUBJ-go-INCEPTIVE `he started to go'
3SUBJ-go-??? `he stopped'
0
votes
4answers
141 views
are there any languages that have sounds in diphthongs that don’t occur in isolation?
essentially i am doing an assignment for class in which we are building a pretend vowel system for a pretend language based on sound files we are given. i had two diphthong files with 5 other files ...
0
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1answer
82 views
Cowgill's law in satem languages [closed]
I had discovered a new law.
I named it "Russian law".
You may rename it as is good in your eyes.
It says that a PIE laryngeal /h₃/, and possibly /h₂/, turns into /z/ in Satem languages. (...
0
votes
1answer
58 views
What’s the name of this figure of speech?
Saying “The not tall boy” instead of “The short boy” does it have a name?
3
votes
0answers
56 views
+50
Origin of English's phrasal possessive
This site claimed that the phrasal possessive in English came from French influence, while the synthetic possessive is Germanic.
Germanic Pattern: the king’s son - cf. German "des Königs Sohn&...
1
vote
2answers
75 views
Do we have a term for priori knowledge in linguistics?
Broadly speaking, these terms have been introduced throughout history to categorize knowledge:
A priori, rationalism, deductive reasoning => meaning that we gain new knowledge, only by using ...
0
votes
1answer
49 views
Term for Regional “Words per Minute”
Is there a term for the variation in how many words per minute is spoken on average by people in various regions of the country/world? A focus group mentioned they wished our Tech Support personnel ...
0
votes
0answers
62 views
Adoption of another language by a community
I am interested in conditions under which a community adopts (or does not adopt) another language, even though this community is sufficiently isolated to be able to continue the use of its previous ...