43
votes
Are the longest German and Turkish words really single words?
From the perspective of linguistics, the question is meaningless though well-intentioned. "Word" is not a well-defined technical concept in linguistics (or, some people may have concocted a ...
- 83.4k
37
votes
Accepted
Why are "eat" and "drink" different words in languages?
The claim that there are always separate lexemes for "eat" and "drink" is not a linguistic universal.
From Anna Wierzbicka's chapter "All people eat and drink. Does this mean ...
- 7,626
33
votes
Why do most languages have a different form for singular vs plural nouns?
First, though you probably already know this, not all languages have different forms for singular and plural nouns. Some don't mark number at all, while others have more fine-grained distinctions, ...
- 69.6k
20
votes
Why are "eat" and "drink" different words in languages?
Adding on to the other answer, probably the most widely-spoken language without an "eat" ~ "drink" distinction is Bengali, which has adapted the native Indo-Aryan "eat" ...
- 1,144
20
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 ...
- 6,337
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 ...
- 83.4k
14
votes
Are the longest German and Turkish words really single words?
In German, noun phrases that are used to describe a separate entity other than their individual nouns are written without spaces. Thus, the example of Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung may indeed ...
- 251
12
votes
Is there a name for the phenomenon of some words being more deeply embedded in a language than others?
You could say that English do is more "grammaticalized" than German tun, and German werden is more grammaticalized than English become.
Section II of "The Grammaticalization of Aspectual Auxiliary ...
- 18.7k
12
votes
Accepted
Is 😂 a word/letter?
In corpus lingustics we deal with corpora containing emojis, e.g., twitter corpora or other corpora of computer mediated communication, and thus it is a legitimate question how to treat them.
Stand-...
- 31.1k
11
votes
Accepted
Estimating the number of words in a language before invention of alphabet
I'm afraid I'm going to have to frame-challenge this one.
For example, it seems intuitive that a spoken language cannot hold too many words without having a way to write them down (imagine having ...
- 69.6k
11
votes
Accepted
What does the absence of a tonal marking on a word in a tonal language imply?
There is no way to know without specific information from the source. In some traditions it means "toneless, unstressed". In some traditions, a specific tone is left out – it could be H, L, or Mid. It ...
- 83.4k
11
votes
What is the name of the first known word from which the current word is derived?
I don't believe there is a single word. I would describe this as the "earliest attested antecedent". I might also use another word like "predecessor", "etymon", or "...
- 9,880
10
votes
Why are "eat" and "drink" different words in languages?
Thai technically has different words for eating (กิน) and drinking (ดื่ม), but I've heard native speakers frequently say stuff like กินน้ำ ("eat water") when they ought to say ดื่มน้ำ ("...
- 976
9
votes
Accepted
What does '# of Cs' mean?
Tragically, the letter "#" has two meanings. In linguistics, it is used to refer to a word boundary. More generally (i.e. not in the special usage of linguists), it (the number sign) stands for "...
- 83.4k
8
votes
'm' in the words meaning first person
For the specific pronouns that you mention, the explanation is that those languages are Indo-European and have a common historical origin (*me, *tu). This happens to extend to Uralic, and the branches ...
- 83.4k
8
votes
Is there a theory of word polysemy? Case of snake versus serpent
There is no derivation in the example you gave. A derivation, in Linguistics, is when a morpheme is added to another morpheme to produce a new meaning.
The case you are talking about can be analysed ...
- 1,535
8
votes
Accepted
Ways a word can be used
This is called the use-mention distinction—that is, the distinction between using a word (to refer to something in the world) versus mentioning the word (in and of itself). Some people prefer the ...
- 69.6k
8
votes
Accepted
What is the name of the first known word from which the current word is derived?
Proto-form may also be used in chemistry, but in linguistics it refers to a reconstructed form from which other forms are derived (see proto-language and comparative method). An example of a proto-...
- 4,840
7
votes
Accepted
How do natural languages prevent word ambiguity in "compound words"?
Natural languages don't do this, ambiguities happen. An example is the German word Staubecken that can be analysed in two ways: Stau-becken "pond, basin, dam reservoir" and Staub-ecken, ...
- 31.1k
6
votes
House vs. home in other languages
Many Romance languages have this distinction. In addition to French foyer noted by @Philippe, there are the Romance cognates Spanish hogar, Galician fogar, with the meaning of "home", from Vulgar ...
- 6,909
6
votes
Word classification and labeling
Yard, bard, computer, paradise are all considered to be English words. You can find each of them listed in an English dictionary, non-italicized, with no usage note saying they are words in another ...
- 18.7k
6
votes
Why do most languages have a different form for singular vs plural nouns?
It is worth mentioning the fact that there seems to be some correlation between the numbers which languages may mark, and the numbers which human brains can treat differently. We can subitise small ...
- 4,698
6
votes
Accepted
Do any languages do without the word for "this" (or "that"), or treat them somehow as nouns/verbs/adjectives?
Do any languages completely do without a concept for "this" and "that"?
The general concept behind "this" and "that" is called "deixis" (from the ...
- 69.6k
6
votes
Why are "eat" and "drink" different words in languages?
We have less specific and more specific verbs so that we have a choice of which information to present.
First, consider the intransitive forms. These descriptions each paint a different scene:
My ...
- 177
6
votes
Is 'will' always volitional, and if not, how can we distinguish action verbs as volitional or non-volitional?
The simple answer is no. A dropped object will fall to the ground even if it has no volition of its own. All mortal beings will die whether they want to or not.
"Will" comes from a word ...
- 69.6k
5
votes
Accepted
Origins of a mystery name/word "Bossyi"
This is a surname which is widespread in Eastern Europe, mainly in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. This word comes from Ukrainian and it is an adjective which means "barefoot, without shoes". In ...
- 18.6k
5
votes
Accepted
Complex example of a language with a word that is a complete English sentence
Polysynthetic languages come close to what you seem to be looking for since apart from marking multiple grammatical functions in one word, they allow a word to combine both noun and verb. Examples are ...
- 83.4k
5
votes
Accepted
Is a word form defined solely by its grapheme sequence? Can two lexemes have a shared word form?
First of all, words (and therefore word forms) are not made of graphemes. They're made of phonemes; either the kind of phoneme spoken as sound (as in English) or the kind of phoneme gestured with the ...
- 5,000
5
votes
Is there a theory of word polysemy? Case of snake versus serpent
Snake and serpent mean exactly the same thing.
Is that really true? Of course they both denote the same class of animals, but that doesn't mean they mean exactly the same thing. They have slightly ...
- 2,645
5
votes
Does Lojban really have “unambiguous resolution of sounds into words”?
This was an important consideration in the design of Lojban, so while I haven't gone through the process of verifying it myself, I'm fairly confident that it is true for most of the language. (Since ...
- 18.7k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible