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1 vote

Most and least common places of articulation across world's languages

Using the IPA classification, the most common place of articulation is the dental-alveolar-postalveolar (lingual) column. Hawaiian has a phoneme whose realization ranges between lingual and velar in ...
user6726's user avatar
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6 votes
Accepted

What script is this, and what does it mean?

This is the Medieval (Latinized) Futhark runic alphabet, written scriptio continua, but the text is English: THE BRAVE MAY LIVE FOREVER
Jeff Zeitlin's user avatar
1 vote

About phrasal verbs, separable verb and verbs with adverbs

German separable verbs and English phrasal verbs are considered basically the same thing --"particle verbs"-- but the grammatical differences between German and English lead to different ...
Alazon's user avatar
  • 365
4 votes

About phrasal verbs, separable verb and verbs with adverbs

Well, separable verbs and phrasal verbs are different things because they work differently. Ich muss die Tür auf-machen. *I need to up-bring it. The particle part of an English phrasal verb never ...
Draconis's user avatar
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0 votes

When is a conjunction not a conjunction?

That reminds me of a structure that comes up a lot in English that I can't quite understand syntactically. Just because I need a bit of space sometimes doesn't mean I don't love you. Of course, it can ...
Imralu's user avatar
  • 107
3 votes

What language has the longest word for 'no' and 'yes'?

I just wanted to point out that "no" in Swahili is hapana, not hakuna. Both are structurally identical, differing only in the class of the subject prefix. Class 16, with pa- generally refers ...
Imralu's user avatar
  • 107
19 votes

Is there a list of word meanings that are universally represented in all languages?

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage is a project that aims to identify the universal building blocks of human language, or "semantic primes". After four decades of empirical research they have ...
curiousdannii's user avatar
  • 6,106
17 votes
Accepted

Is there a list of word meanings that are universally represented in all languages?

No, there may not be any universal meanings. Here is an example. In most (maybe all) Bantu languages, there is no word for "hand" and no word for "arm", because there is a word ...
user6726's user avatar
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