Unanswered Questions
287 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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Punic name of Pantelleria island
The ancient name of Pantelleria island (Sicilia, Italy) is usually written in latin characters as YRNM.
I relied on a table to convert these characters in punic characters and (considering punics ...
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Why is mean harmonicity of a pure noise a valid value as measured in Praat?
In Praat, I created a pure Gaussian noise with randomGauss(0,0.2). In my opinion, since no f0 information can be traced from the signal, the harmonicity of the sound will be an invalid value, such as ...
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What free objective tools can be used for assessing pronunciation?
I'm also interested in fluency and intonation.
Any insights will be wonderful.
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60
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Multiple articulations, one sound
I've read a close duplicate, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for. I'm not thinking of how we use one symbol to represent a range of values.
Recently someone told me they felt they were "...
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Does pre-fortis clipping have any effect on unstressed syllables?
In books such as J.C. Wells' Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (LPD) or Collins and et al.'s Practical English Phonetics and Phonology, there's no mentioning that clipping only affects stressed ...
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History of words for a thing - the opposite of etymology?
What is a term that describes which words were used to describe a thing in the world?
Answering the question "How did people refer to ...?"
Is this a sub-discipline of linguistics?
Is it ...
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131
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Any old noun class system without chaotic formal/ semantic assignment
When noun class/gender system gets old, the semantic/formal assignment rules of the noun class become more opaque/unreliable because of loanwords and erosion of (derivational) suffixes and etc.
eg. in ...
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What are some closest sounding numerals without any alternative pronunciation in a major modern language?
Most studies of numeral systems are about the base and not related to the confusability of how they sound too similar.
Numbers are too important in modern societies. Numerals are very context-...
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Are voiced sounds considered "weaker" than voiceless ones? If so, why?
The motivation for asking this question was checking up on the Wikipedia page for Lentition, which says that it can involve "voicing a voiceless consonant", even though it's described as a ...
CommunityBot
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2
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Different degrees of diachronic stability for different phonological properties?
Has any research sought to identify which types of phonemes or phonological features tend to be more or less resistant to change over time relative to others? I'd love to know of any relevant research ...
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3
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Empirical basis for the limit of the comparative method?
I've heard lots of different numbers thrown around in the literature to the 'upper bound' of how far back in time the comparative method can go. The most pessimistic numbers hover around 7,000 years ...
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Why would Chinese ESL learners read FOR/OF alternately?
I noticed that many of my Chinese students read "of" as "for" and vice versa.
I understand that this could be a case of metathesis, but what would be the cause of this? I notice ...
- 9,880
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Why are epiglottal consonants easier to do lying on your back?
I was watching a Youtube video(1) on how to pronounce the Arabic letters 'ayn (ع; commonly called a "voiced pharyngeal fricative" but per Ladefoged more often a creaky epiglottal approximant)...
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Origin of a special Sinhala letterform
In Sinhala, the usual form of the short U diacritic is that of a hook on the bottom of a letter:
a) ක + ු -> කු, කූ
b) ම + ු -> මු, මූ
This takes an exceptional form for the letter R, like ...
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F0 as a distinguishing factor in certain sibilants?
I am currently planning a research paper about pitch's role in distinguishing [s̪], [s̻], [s̺], [ʂ], and [ɕ], and I don't know if there already exists literature about this. The closest I was able to ...
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