9
votes
Is there a shared word for "word" and "thing" in any language other than Hebrew?
The Proto-Slavic word *rěčь “speech” (Old Church Slavonic рѣчь) has its descendants in all the modern Slavic languages, mostly with the same meaning. But in Polish rzecz [ʐɛtʂ] and in Ukrainian річ (...
- 17.7k
8
votes
Is there a shared word for "word" and "thing" in any language other than Hebrew?
Japanese こと koto corresponds to both "(abstract) thing, matter" (written 事) and "word" (written 言), although the word for "word" in the modern language is 言葉 kotoba, a ...
- 5,065
5
votes
Is there a shared word for "word" and "thing" in any language other than Hebrew?
Aramaic mellṯā has the same two meanings (not just in Jewish dialects, but also in Syriac etc.)
- 23.7k
4
votes
Can someone explain to me the Zipf–Mandelbrot law?
As this is the Linguistics site, I'm guessing it is Zipf's Law you are interested in? If you analyze a corpus of text, and count the number of times each word occurs, you get their frequency. You then ...
- 219
1
vote
The Correct Research Methodology To Substantiate If an Expression is an Idiom?
In another answer, here, I introduced the notion of a derived phrase structure rule, as an alternative to phrase structure derivation. In effect, every constituent, together with its grammatical ...
- 12.4k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible