Unanswered Questions
2,180 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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Do the "gibberish lines" in the Charition farce reflect a Dravidian language?
The Charition farce (P.Oxy. III, 413) is a Greek theatre play which tells the story of a girl, Χαριτίων Charitíōn, who is held captive in a coastal kingdom of India. The only manuscript of this ...
- 775
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Did the discovery of Akkadian texts written in Ugaritic script affect our knowledge of Akkadian?
Besides Ugaritic, Hurrian and Akkadian texts, written in Ugaritic alphabetic script, were also discovered at Ras Shamra.1
My question is straightforward: did the discovery of Akkadian texts written ...
- 976
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Why in the world are French "Paul" and "Paule" distinguished by vowel openness?
Wikipedia lists
Paul [pɔl] ('Paul', masculine), vs. Paule [pol] ('Paule', feminine),
as a minimal pair of the two mid rounded back vowels of French.
What I wonder is, how did it happen that the two ...
- 159
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What's the geographic distribution of the father/bra split in American English?
In most American English dialects with the father/bother merger, the bother vowel (originally /ɔ/) unrounds, lowers, and merges into the father vowel (originally /ɑ/), with the end result being /ɑ/, ...
- 183
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The negative in "Sophie ate all her strawberries and so didn't Amelia"
New England speakers often use a negative form such as so didn't where others would use the positive, as in Sophie ate all her strawberries and so didn't Amelia. Since this usage may confuse a speaker ...
- 538
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Is rising intonation (almost) universally associated with questions across languages, and why?
It seems that in most languages, rising intonation/prosody (towards the end of the sentence) is typically associated with questions. Thus:
How prevalent is this practice, and are there major ...
- 587
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How diachronically stable is release type?
Are there examples of languages completely shifting from (vocalic) release of all coda stops to, say, nasal release?
I imagine substrate effects could account for some of these cases (cf. unreleased ...
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Have there been any reconstructive efforts of proto-languages, where aspects of historic culture have been inferred for languages other than PIE?
I'm not sure if this is the right SE to ask this question (possibly History SE?), but here goes!
Similar to the source material for this video, have there been any efforts to infer aspects of culture ...
- 151
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I read that Julius Caesar read silently in front of his men and this amazed them -- was Caesar's ability rare?
It seems to me that at this time, written words were basically instructions for reading out loud.
I would guess that while Caesar was exceptionally educated for his time and that indeed the men who ...
- 555
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In Armenian, which parts of each letter are intrinsic and must be demarcated from joining up strokes in joined-up handwriting?
My question [1] is about handwritten Armenian [2], but to illustrate what I am asking I will first say something about English and Russian, languages which are likely to be known by larger proportions ...
CommunityBot
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What kind of syntax diagrams are these, found in a book on legal writing?
These don't look like syntax trees in undergrad linguistics syntax textbooks. Do linguists use these diagrams? What are they called?
Page 343.
Diagrams for grammatical analysis are visual aids to ...
- 4,840
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Why does French use diminutive suffixes differently from other Romance languages?
I'm a native French speaker, and I noticed that for a lot of masculine objects, we use the suffix -ette to designate a smaller version of it, which turns it into a feminine word. Here are a few ...
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How did "murder of crows", "pride of lions" and similar collective classifiers in English come to be used?
Classifiers come in many varieties.[1] Many languages have them. Chinese has words like "本" (ben) used for books and similar nouns, 條 (tiao) for long, skinny things, etc. Vietnamese has ...
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How does syntax of our language affect our thoughts?
Our language affects the way we perceive the world. I know it is not only because the words that don’t exist in one of the languages may exist in the other ones, but also because of the grammar. We ...
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Why do I speak in a lower (deeper) voice in foreign languages compared to my mother tongue
I'm a native German speaker. I myself and friends have noticed, that when I speak in English, my voice becomes lower (deeper) and if I speak in Finnish, even lower than in English. If I concentrate I ...
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