51
votes
Accepted
Is there any language that uses different pronouns for "we" depending on whether the spoken to person is included in the group?
Yes, this feature is called clusivity, there are dozens of languages that have it, for example Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Malay, Hawaiian, etc. This article has a list of such languages together ...
- 17.7k
42
votes
Accepted
Are there modern languages without standardized spelling? If not, why?
First, let's define our terms. Spelling is "standardized" if there's some authority that people listen to on the topic. This can be a government agency, like the Académie Française, or a ...
- 62.3k
36
votes
Accepted
Are there languages without words for "father" or "mother" but only "parent"?
The only such language I know about is Pirahã, the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. It is minimalistic in many ways, having the least number of phonemes (only 11),...
- 17.7k
33
votes
Which languages have different words for "maternal uncle" and "paternal uncle"?
As @YellowSky pointed, a very large number of languages make this distinction. The Wiktionary lists don’t even scratch the surface, since most languages are not in Wiktionary, and the real number ...
- 4,950
32
votes
Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?
In Thai, 1st person singular pronouns differ by gender:
Masc.: ผม [pʰǒm]
Fem.: ดิฉัน [dìʔt͡ɕʰán]
- 8,557
30
votes
Accepted
Are there languages where a change of character casing can lead to a different meaning of a word?
It’s worth pointing out that uppercase and lowercase characters are mostly a quirk of the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets.[1] While these alphabets probably make up a plurality of written texts,[...
- 1,160
29
votes
Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?
Coming at this from a different direction, Japanese personal pronouns (*) are an open class, with many variations in meaning and connotation.
So while there's no official "first-person masculine ...
- 62.3k
28
votes
Are there languages in which "coffee" is not a cognate of a root containing k/q and f/h/w?
First of all I would like to say that these words are not cognates; they are loanwords.
The coffee plant is indigenous in the highlands of Ethiopia. It was transplanted to the Yemen in the 14th ...
- 23.7k
28
votes
Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?
Proto-Afro-Asiatic likely marked gender on second-person pronouns, and many of its descendants do the same.
For example, second-person singular masculine is אַתָּה (ʔattāh) in Hebrew, أَنْتَ (ʔanta) ...
- 62.3k
23
votes
Are there modern languages without standardized spelling? If not, why?
As Katai has pointed out in the comments Swiss German is a modern langauge that has no standardised spelling. In "Mundartwörterbüchern"(=Dialect dictionaries) one can see two different ideas ...
- 331
21
votes
Accepted
Are there any languages without /a/ or /i/?
It depends on what you mean by "/a/", "/i/". First, slash brackets refer ambiguously to "phonemes" or "underlying forms". Only phonetic forms, notated with square brackets, have directly-observable ...
- 80.3k
21
votes
Accepted
What's the origin of "You're welcome"?
As the other answers show, English is not the only language with this phrase, but we can examine the etymology of it to explain what it means.
When did this usage start?
The OED has
3d. A polite ...
- 373
21
votes
Accepted
Languages with different words for 'we'
This distinction is called clusivity and as far as I know no language has a three-way distinction here, having at most a two way inclusive (1 & 3 in your list), exclusive (2 in your list) ...
- 6,387
20
votes
Accepted
Do any languages use {woman} as the root for human?
In Arabic the word for “human being of either sex” is ʼinsān, from the same root as nisāʼ “women”. The usual word for “male human being” is rajul.
- 23.7k
20
votes
Accepted
Do any languages mention the top limit of a range first?
In German, I am aware of two instances where the "reverse" order is used:
1) The weather forecast of the newscast "Tagesschau" (and quite possibly many other weather forecasts, but not all) always ...
- 316
20
votes
Are there languages with more vowels than consonants?
Probably the best-known and most often-cited example of this is Danish.
Danish is generally said to have around 17 or 18 consonant phonemes, a fairly invariant number. The number of vowel phonemes ...
- 3,536
18
votes
Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?
In Spanish that happends for plural:
nosotros (1st person plural masculine)
nosotras (1st person plural femenine)
In Japanese there are several forms for the first form depending on gender or even age!...
- 181
18
votes
Language that uses [t] (or [k]?) in formal settings and [k] (or [t]?) in in informal
There are a few Polynesian languages such as Hawaiian and Samoan that don't contrast [t] and [k] i.e. [t] and [k] exist as allophones of /t/.
The language you're looking for seems to be Samoan where /...
- 1,379
18
votes
Which non-Indoeuropean languages have noun-adjective agreement?
Egyptian and many of the older Semitic languages put a /t/ on feminine nouns and any adjectives modifying them, and many also mark number (singular, dual, plural) on both. A few of these languages (e....
- 62.3k
17
votes
Which languages have different words for "maternal uncle" and "paternal uncle"?
Another concrete example to extend upon these already excellent answers is the Swedish language. Here, the terms are "farbror" for a paternal uncle (literally: "father-brother") ...
- 171
15
votes
What's the origin of "You're welcome"?
Visiting Quebec I heard "vous êtes bienvenue" a good few times! I assumed this to have entered the language from English, but this is a part of the world that's very proud of its French heritage (to ...
- 251
15
votes
Accepted
Is there any language where verb inflection takes place word-initially?
Look into the Bantu languages, such as Swahili. Tense, aspect, and subject agreement are all marked at the beginning of the verb.
- 62.3k
15
votes
Accepted
Are there any languages which inflect the noun for morphosyntactic categories normally reserved for verbs (e.g. tense, aspect, etc.)?
Here is a relevant Wikipedia article: Nominal TAM
There is a fair amount of literature that mentions the existence of languages that mark tense on nouns; the first result I found on Google was this ...
- 17.4k
15
votes
Languages with different words for 'we'
I'm from the Philippines and we have different kinds of "we" in Tagalog/Filipino language.
We (you and I) = "Tayo"
We (them and I, but not you) = "Kami"
We (all of us) = ...
- 251
15
votes
Which non-Indoeuropean languages have noun-adjective agreement?
In the Atlantic-Congo languages that have noun classes, and that is most of them, adjectives agree in the class with the noun they modify.
In the Bantu subfamily, the adjectives agrees by receiving ...
- 17.7k
14
votes
Do any languages mark social distinctions other than gender and status?
One interesting marker of social distinctions is an avoidance register, a special way of speaking to certain family members. You might also hear this called mother-in-law language or hlonipha/...
- 62.3k
14
votes
Which cultures are big-endian?
This is potentially a very interesting question, but it suffers from conflation of “language”, “culture”, and “country”. It is the same sort of confusion that happens when people who do not speak ...
- 23.7k
13
votes
Are there languages in which "coffee" is not a cognate of a root containing k/q and f/h/w?
Armenian: սուրճ [surch] (Wiktionary)
English: java (Wiktionary)
In the 17th century, the Dutch colonized the island of Java, which is now part of Indonesia. They planted lots of coffee there and ...
- 8,557
13
votes
My friend suddenly speaks an unknown language after sleep. Need help with recognition
Sorry, this is mostly not a direct answer to your question. (Skip to the end for the more answer-y part.) I'm posting this as an answer since it's too long for the comments.
Speaking a previously ...
- 17.4k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible