All Questions

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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"? ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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?

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 ...

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 ...

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? (...

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 ...

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 ?)

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 ...

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 ...

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)...

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 ...

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&...

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]....

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

I am confused as to whether "this" and "these" belong to the same lexeme

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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,...

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'

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 ...

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. (...

Saying “The not tall boy” instead of “The short boy” does it have a name?

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&...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...