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Why don't currently spoken languages have words for everything they encounter?

The lack of a native word for "shrimp" in Amharic can be predicted on geographical grounds, that shrimp don't live 400 miles inland, 8,000 ft up in the mountains. The English borrowing ሽሪምፕ ...
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2 votes

Why don't currently spoken languages have words for everything they encounter?

Given that the turkey is native to North America, it's pretty unlikely that people in Ethiopia were discussing them before very recent times. Conversely, English-speakers weren't having many ...
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What exactly is meant by "part of speech" (POS) in linguistics and NLP?

One purpose of parts-of-speech is to simplify grammatical descriptions. They group together words that behave in a similar way, and their behaviours can then be more easily described in rules. They ...
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What exactly is meant by "part of speech" (POS) in linguistics and NLP?

"Part of speech" is only marginally recognized in theoretical linguistics, instead linguists deal in features, and then perhaps offer informal recognitions of traditional parts of speech in ...
user6726's user avatar
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