All Questions

I am looking for linguistics exercises to do over the summer. These can be from websites providing worksheets, or recommendations of textbooks which contain such exercises or worksheets, or ...

Many languages have comparative and superlative suffixes or other morphological forms such as English ‘-er’ and ‘-est’, Latin ‘-or’ and ‘-issimus’, and Arabic ‘afʕal’ template, but I couldn’t find ...

The English ethnonyms "Jew" and "Jewish" originate from the Biblical Hebrew "Yehudi" (יהודי, meaning "Judahite," "Judean," or "one from the ...

Stop consonants: b,p,g,t,d,k are pronounced very lightly or not at all, but this is optional. For instance, "wait"/weit|/ or /weit/, "stop"/st^p|/ or /st^p/ Variations in t ...

Most romance languages and most Germanic languages words for men belong to a single cognate class for each language family (home, ome, homme, uomo, hombre... for romance languages and man, Mann, mann.....

Does anyone know the technical name for letters without accents glyphs etc? Like what's the opposite of diacritic? Grapheme? Thanks for your advice. amoré é vs e

Although a closed question, reading THIS we find a link to Wictionary with the text: From Proto-Albanian *baltā (“marsh”), hypothetically from a Proto-Indo-European *bʰolHto- (“white > marsh”), a ...

Here is the word for "brother-in-law" in various modern Germanic languages: schwager (German), shvugger (Yiddish), swaer (Afrikaans), svoger (Norweigan/Danish), sogor (Croatian), zwager (...

In handling the concept of dialects of a common language among characters in "classical" role-playing games (e.g., D&D, Traveller), one idea for signalling 'foreign' dialects that often ...

Is there a word we lost the definition to? A word whose definition we lost to history? Something that is a part of our history but we forgot the meaning with time

I was reading the Wikipedia page on Order of acquisition and they said that many studies in the 1970s studied "whether a consistent order of morpheme acquisition", e.g. in L2 learners for ...

Does anyone know how you pronounce the root vowel of the word cometh in ME and EModE? What is this particular sound change called?

This is not an English-specific question. In Japanese, you might also ask "何時から何時までですか。" Or "nan ji kare nan ji made desu ka", "From what time to what time?" (from Google)...

The accepted answer to this question quoted Chomsky's (1955) famous “sentence” Colorless green ideas sleep furiously and an earlier example from Tesnière (1940s), which translates to English as The ...

In other words, Is there an internal measure/index of "cohesion" of language? I was thinking of the contrast between artificial languages that machines or humans produce, and natural ...

Is there any site where I can find the list of natural languages that dont have a list of phonemes? I want to discover the minimum amount of vowels needed to make sure each natural language has at ...

I've heard of languages that contrast [r] and [ɾ] but I am unable to find any language that contrast a normal trill and a long trill. I searched far and near but to no avail. So is there any language ...

I wanted to self-thought learn Sanskrit, but I don't find any reliable resource available online. The only way I can learn is online and through self-through. It's physically impossible for me to find ...

It is said that in IPA, each symbol represents a unique sound. But on the Wikipedia page on the Voiceless Velar Fricative (/x/), I find these examples: Hindustani 'ख़ुशी' /xuʃi:/ (sometimes खुशी, /...

There are many English words with two different core etymologies, often Latin + Greek. For example: Claustrophobia – from the Latin claustrum meaning "confined space" and Greek φόβος (...

Can we tell when was PII spoken ? I read somewhere that it has to be before indo iranian split and the The two things which really anchor it are the common words for chariots and camels. Proto-chariot ...

Some people pronounce their [ʃ] not in the 'classic' way but by curving the tongue and bringing it forward toward the upper set of teeth. Here's an audio example I've created. My question: is there a ...

In learning about the three Buddhist marks of existence - referred to by the Sanskrit words anatman (lack of permanent self), anitya (impermanence) and dukkha (suffering) - I was interested to learn ...

Is there a name use to describe tuples of the form (word, meaning)? Example: ("wood", the material made from trees) ("wood", a geographical area with many trees) In this case we ...

I recently noticed that German, English and Spanish seem to have a parallel colloquial use of their future tense, in which it's used to express a hypothesis about the present: Literal meaning: I think ...

For instance, in German you'll have Der Mann singular, Die Männer plural, instead of, say, Die Männen. It seems this is because you don't want to over-expose the speaker to the "n" sound. ...

I'm not always 100% confident in my judgment of whether or not a final oral stop has an accompanying glottal stop. I don't think this can be checked on the spectrogram but would be pleased to learn I'...

In elementary school I was told of the eight "parts of speech" (and in English they should really have said ten rather than eight, including articles and particles). I understood six of them....

Do I have a point to say that, in the area of science, people have difficulties understanding it mostly due to the way words are used to describe whatever it may be? One may understand the words ...

Chapter 1 of Parasitic Gaps, edited by Culicover and Postal, begins with this example: Which articles did John file t without reading pg? The italicized t is reported to be a "true gap" ...

Can a topic ever correspond to a focus? In the sentence below, the left dislocated topic is the antecedent of the resumptive pronoun she, but she is in focus. 'Mary, SHE ate my cake!' Context: I know ...

Google definitions states that media has it roots in: late 19th century: shortening of modern Latin tunica (or membrana ) media ‘middle sheath (or layer)’. This really did not make much sense to me, ...

Arabic has سلام‎ (salaam) and Hebrew has שָׁלוֹם‎ (shalom). The words have similar meanings of "peace". This seems like a case of an alveolar fricative shifting to post-alveolar fricative (...

The book "Experiencing Speech: A Skills Based, Panlingual Approach to Actor Training" sets out to describe all the possible movements of the articulators. One of these is "cupping" ...

It seems that in most languages, rising intonation/prosody (towards the end of the sentence) is typically associated with questions. Thus: How prevalent is this practice, and are there major ...

I am wondering about tones. Specifically, wondering if there are cases where a tone shifts from one vowel to the next, perhaps in some language like Mandarin Chinese or Vietnamese, if not some African ...

Contrary to the traditional supposition of /ɪ ʊ ɛ ɔ/ vs /iː uː eː oː/, the idea that Classical Latin contrasted the short and long versions of high and mid (or just mid) vowels only quantitatively, ...

Every time I try to look this up, it always gives me the number for native speakers. I'm not looking for that. I specifically want to know how prevalent Egyptian Arabic is as a second language around ...

I am constructing Avestan sentence for a language research paper on Iranian languages Are these conclusions correct Subject Azə̄m = I {singular 1st person, nominative) Object θβąm = you (singular ...

On the Wikipedia page for Hindustani phonology, it lists Hindustani as having ten vowels, three short and seven long. More importantly, it claims that there is a distinction between /o/ and /ɔ/, and ...

I found there are two versions of Serbian: https://sh.wikipedia.org https://sr.wikipedia.org/sr-el/ May I know what's the difference? Would someone please explain in details? Thanks

What is the reason of w dissimilation? Gothic waurts + gards ~ aurtigards or OE wyrt +‎ ġeard ~ ortgeard

Sound laws such as the Canaanite shift, which is the proposed law that Proto-NW-Semitic *ā -> Proto-Canaanite ō, and the celebrated Grimm's Law. Is there a database that lists all transformations ...

By "generative grammar", I take the widest interpretation and do not mean "Chomsky's theory of syntax today", thus HPSG and LFG would be instances of GG(broad). Phonology has a ...

I know that Rotokas language has fewer consonants than most (all?) languages. But I haven't been able to find a language that has no consonants (whether phonemic or phonetic). Does such a language ...

In formal semantics, the theory of generalized quantifiers analyzes quantifiers (e.g. all, some, no, most, few, etc.) in terms of sets to sets. The meaning of the quantifier some, for instance, is ...

This might be a strangely framed question for a liguist, since I'm a physicist and know very little about this field. My question relates to how changing a symbol (for example a letter) in a word ...

Why Proto-Germanic *frēgō is reconstructed on the following forms (not *fragō PIE o-grade of *frehnaną )? from wiktionary

What is the name of Proto-Germanic e/ē lengthening before ō? *kwelaną *kwēlō *wrekaną *wrēkō *sprekaną *sprēkō *frehnaną *frēgō I know that e/ē lengthening before "i" is Vṛddhi gerundive? *...

What type of expansion is which is here in the following? When the stream divides, which is here, the main stream flows into .... I've been working with Halliday & Matthiessen (2004) and am trying ...