37
votes
Accepted
Is there any evidence that the modern word for "bear" is an euphemism which replaced the original taboo word?
You are correct that whilst the argument that the original term was replaced is pretty strong, the arguments for taboo being the reason for its replacement is much less clear-cut.
The first thing ...
- 9,201
19
votes
At what point does a language become its descendant?
This is a difficult question. Greek is perceived as one language despite the fact that Classical Greek is no longer intelligible for a native speaker of Modern Greek without exposure to the classical ...
- 30.4k
13
votes
Accepted
State of language in the hunter-gatherer era of Europe / Levant?
There is no controversy over the existence of the contemporary language faculty as recently as 40 Kya, though we should omit speculations about persistence of Neanderthals and their language capacity ...
- 83.3k
12
votes
Vanishing of cases: general trend or specific to indo-European family?
It's not just a modern trend. Four millennia ago we see Hittite (Indo-European) gradually losing its elaborate case-marking system, and Akkadian (Semitic) reducing its three cases to two (and ...
- 68.2k
11
votes
Origin of Present Perfect in Romance Languages
The similarity is due to a common pathway of grammaticalistion. The have + past participle form comes from a resultative construction (Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca, 1994), which commonly leads to the ...
- 3,461
11
votes
Accepted
When does language "evolve" and when is it just wrong grammar?
It's right if other people who speak your dialect (other people in your speech community) also say the same thing systematically. In the Japanese case, it's clear that the construction is correct in ...
- 3,461
11
votes
Accepted
Why has the neuter gender disappeared from almost all the modern Romance languages?
I've read that even in Latin, we see some variability in the declension of words as neuter or masculine. Sometimes the use of the masculine where neuter would be expected is attributed to "...
- 18.7k
9
votes
Origin of Present Perfect in Romance Languages
To the excellent answer by @WavesWashSands I'll only add that some Latin verbs employed a perfective construction with the verb esse "to be" and a participle, which at some point could have motivated ...
- 1,235
8
votes
Fronting of /u/ from Latin to French
The question does not accurately summarize the relevant sound changes. Latin short /u/ was not fronted to /y/. Only Latin long /uː/, as in dūrus /duːrus/, regularly developed to /y/ in French. (Of ...
- 18.7k
8
votes
Accepted
Why is it thought that definite articles develop from deictic markers, and not the other way around?
For English in particular, we have older stages of the language attested: Shakespeare, Chaucer, whoever wrote Beowulf. And we can see that in Beowulf "the" had the force of a demonstrative, but ...
- 68.2k
8
votes
Accepted
Why is "knife" in Ukrainian different from other Slavic languages?
This is one of the most salient and well-known features of Ukrainian, and the first mentioned in Wikipedia’s description of the history of the Ukrainian language; it is not just this word. The ...
- 5,000
7
votes
Accepted
Possible diachronic developments of th sounds
Proto-Semitic *ϑ becomes /ϑ/ in (classical) Arabic, /t/ in Aramaic and some Arabic dialects, /ʃ/ in Hebrew, /s/ in Amharic, /f/ in some Arabic dialects.
Proto-Semitic *δ becomes /δ/ in (classical) ...
- 24.4k
7
votes
How can all languages be considered equally "good" at expressing ideas when language had to evolve from something more primitive?
The problem with Deutscher’s theory is that it posits the exact opposite of what we can observe in real languages across time. If we look at the long-term development from Latin to Romance; from ...
- 24.4k
7
votes
Has the Russian way of pronunciation been affected by frost?
The multidisciplinary study of how climate and other environmental factors can be of influence to linguistic features in general and to phonetics in particular is something very young and results are ...
- 919
7
votes
Accepted
Looking for examples of natural languages with affricates but no corresponding fricatives/plosives
A likely place to start, I think, would be to find an affricate that’s relatively common, but whose corresponding fricative is not all that common. The most obvious candidate to me is /(d)ʒ/.
The most ...
- 5,000
6
votes
Accepted
Why does the name for Germany vary so much between languages?
The primary reason is because there were many Germanic tribes with which the other nations came into contact with directly. This may actually be because of the position in Central Europe - i.e. the ...
- 2,363
6
votes
When does language "evolve" and when is it just wrong grammar?
I think it is important to look at the general tendency in which the language is evolving. If a language is loosing some distinctions, then there will be an important trend of speaking/writing without ...
- 1,769
6
votes
Why did English evolve to have so little inflection?
There is a trend for languages, in general, to lose inflection of a certain type, and Indo-European languages manifest that trend. Particular facts of English have encouraged that development, and ...
- 83.3k
6
votes
How is it possible to reconstruct old accents of a language?
Oftentimes we have documents that talk about how things were pronounced, especially when they criticize people for how they talk (the Romans were rather famous for that). Texts like poems are also ...
- 944
6
votes
Accepted
How did English end up with a voiced "z" at the end of words?
Yes, it exists in other Indo-European languages.
For example, in the French word française.
It also exists in some other Romance languages like Romanian, in Serbo-Croatian and Ukrainian, in Armenian ...
- 8,094
5
votes
Why there are no grammatical cases in the French language?
It has to do mostly with sound change. French underwent two principal sound changes that effectively prevented it from keeping the case system from Latin.
1) Elision of any post-accentual vowels: ...
- 2,363
5
votes
Where did the discussion of the language faculty between Fitch, Hauser, Chomsky and Pinker and Jackendoff terminate?
The debate ended in 2005.
Shortly after this, Chomsky (2005/2008 (written in 2005, and circulated, published in 2008) wrote On Phases which did not acknowledge anything from his previous papers co-...
- 331
5
votes
Can two close languages be merged?
Whether Norwegians and Danes living in the same place would end up speaking 1 vs. 2 languages depends on the extent to which they remain culturally Norwegians vs. Danes, or simply generalized ...
- 83.3k
5
votes
What is it called when a word is used based on an extant definition which no longer actually applies? e.g. "dial" with phones
That's called the 'generalization / extension / broadening' of meaning: words with concrete meaning (like 'dialing' meaning 'calling by turning the round wheel on the phone') begin to mean more ...
- 18.6k
5
votes
How fast is the number of languages spoken today decreasing/increasing?
If language-name plays a central role in determining what "language" one speaks (I speak English, as do hundreds of millions of others), then the number of languages is decreasing. Many languages are ...
- 83.3k
5
votes
Accepted
Absence of vowel combination /ou/ in Spanish
It seems this was a combination of:
'ou' being rare in Latin words and only in environments where vowels would undergo changes in the evolution to Spanish, and
instances of vowel + consonant ...
- 3,132
5
votes
At what point does a language become its descendant?
At what point do we say "These people in the Italian peninsula are no longer speaking Latin; they are speaking Italian"?
There used to be an official answer to this: Italians were taught that Dante'...
- 2,645
5
votes
When and how did the Japanese honorific system evolve?
As a partial answer, this dissertation by K. Russell reconstructs verbal morphology of proto-Japonic. Certain morphemes are reconstructed (ch. 4) at the level of proto-Japonic, but others are only ...
- 83.3k
4
votes
Can two close languages be merged?
There are some examples of language merger in history. Note that such a merger is rarely a "merger of equals" where both languages contribute about the same amount to the resulting merged language.
...
- 30.4k
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