New answers tagged english
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Phonetic/acoustic difference between /ˈæb.sə.luːt/ and /ˈæp.sə.luːt/
The way most people I've heard say it, they sort of say ˈæbp.sə.luːt. Nobody really seems to notice the difference.
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Why do nouns typically have their main stress on the penultimate while verbs on the ultimate (according to theories other than that of Hayes)?
One version of a "why" answer is to study the history of the system: I would recommend looking at this paper and references therein (Danielsson 1948; Dresher & Lahiri 2005; Fikkert, ...
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Is 'love' transitive?
In the above sentence, “I gave Joe the book,” while there are two (2) objects, Joe is considered the indirect object & the book the direct object.
Re “love” being intransitive, I saw a sample that ...
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Is “actual” both a false friend and a cognate?
Yes, like many false friends, they are true cognates.
From the Wiktionary definition of cognate
English embarrassed is a true cognate of Spanish embarazada but is a false friend because the modern ...
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Phonetic/acoustic difference between /ˈæb.sə.luːt/ and /ˈæp.sə.luːt/
There is no word "apsolute" in English. You can collect myriad tokens of "absolute" and sort them in terms of the persistence of voicing into the labial, then picking out examples ...
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Why did Canadian English remain so close to standard U.S English?
The North American accent is primarily an evolution from Scottish Irish accents. We hard roll our r’s—“carrrr”, “hearrrrt”—unlike the other colonial accents that don’t pronounce the r unless it hits ...
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Accepted
Are the Croatian word "struna" (string of a musical instrument) and the English word "string" related?
Both Slavic and Germanic have str- as the regular reflex of word-initial PIE *sr- (and also *str-, although this is rarer), so genuine cognates beginning with str- in Germanic will be expected to ...
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Why are voiceless plosives (p, t, k) unaspirated after /s/?
A bit late to this very interesting question which had also troubled me for years to find the answer. My answer for this question is that it's simply the way those sound are pronounced in English! ...
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Do non-tonal languages evolve into tonal languages?
This is a challenge to the assertion in the question Native speakers have emphasized to me how much more compactly the same idea can be expressed in Mandarin than in English.
According to the paper ...
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Do non-tonal languages evolve into tonal languages?
The general phenomenon you're looking for is called tonogenesis and there's a fair amount of literature on it.
It's behind a paywall, but in the event that you can get access this is a good overview ...
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Accepted
Chomsky on licensing parasitic gaps in English
Parasitic Gaps
The book(i) that you filed __(i) without reading __(i)
The book that [you filed the book [without reading the book]]
In the example noun phrase, modelled in (1) and (2) above, we see ...
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