Unanswered Questions
324 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
17
votes
2
answers
1k
views
Do dialects without the meet-meat merger neutralize the distinction in some contexts?
For many dialects of English (including my own) multiple historical lexical sets are merged into one "FLEECE" set (this diaphoneme can be represented with IPA /iː/).
I've read about the basics of the ...
- 658
15
votes
0
answers
2k
views
How did Chinese recursion evolve?
The modern Chinese linguistic recursion system is essentially the same as the English one. If you have a highly embedded sentence, you can translate it word for word; the embedding is very much the ...
- 305
11
votes
0
answers
380
views
What kind of features support the claim that Slavic languages are closer to Germanic languages than to Indo-Iranian languages?
Inspired by this answer to a different question, I ask what kind of features justify a claim that Balto-Slavic languages are closer to Germanic languages than to Indo-Iranian languages.
The features ...
- 10.1k
11
votes
1
answer
539
views
Merger of perfect and aorist in Italic and Celtic
One of the common features of the Italic and Celtic branches is the merger of perfect and aorist. So, in the surviving "perfect" forms we find a mixture of old aorist stems and old perfect ...
CommunityBot
- 1
9
votes
0
answers
112
views
Is anything known about the origin of the hard "g" in "guénti" in Santiago, Cape Verdean Creole?
There is a word "guénti" /'gɛn ti/ in the Santiago dialect of Cape Verdean Creole, which is used to mean "people" or "you people/you all". It clearly comes from the ...
- 455
9
votes
0
answers
302
views
Phonological development of Middle Chinese 學 /hæwk/ to Mandarin xue /ɕye/
學 was /hæwk/ according to Baxter-Sagart transcription of Qieyun, and according to this wikipedia page, -æwk became /Jye/ in modern Mandarin, where J is a palatalized initial consonant.
What I'm ...
- 537
7
votes
0
answers
1k
views
Why is the word "wherefore" not "whatfore" and the word "therefore" not "thatfore" and related anomalies
There is a pronominal adverb in many germanic languages that is a conjunction of the descendants of the proto-germanic words *hwar (where) + *furi (for/fore) which means something very similar to "for ...
- 1,391
7
votes
0
answers
160
views
“Reconstruction” of an attested and well studied language
I wonder has anyone ever tried to reconstruct Latin language via data on modern Romance languages as if we know nothing about what Latin actually was.
Both as a fun exercise and as a method to test ...
- 31.1k
7
votes
0
answers
423
views
How to determine the direction of conversion?
Recently I have been researching the topic of nominalizations. I learned that such structures might be created by means of morphological derivation (be it affixes, clitics, light verbs) or zero-...
- 6,337
7
votes
0
answers
94
views
In which non-Sinitic languages do negative clauses retain older constituent order in SVC-derived complex predicates?
Many complex predicates are historically derived from serial verb constructions. This is not only true of the Sinitic family. For example, in Saramaccan (Byrne 1987, as cited in Givón 2009):
(1) a ...
- 3,472
7
votes
0
answers
424
views
Why were written sentences longer in the past?
These ELU answers affirm, but do not explain, the decrease in written sentence length. So why?
To allow for comparison with modern dialects, I restrict this question to:
writing in European ...
CommunityBot
- 1
6
votes
0
answers
192
views
Just how silent is the French e muet?
I know the e muet is usually considered silent. That being said, it is still often pronounced in songs and poetry (famously, in the Marseillaise). This is completely contrary to the situation in ...
- 161
6
votes
0
answers
157
views
What historical change(s) shortened vowels in Old and Middle English?
In a 1968 paper by Kiparsky ("Linguistic universals and linguistic change"), a historical-change argument is made for the brace notation of SPE, based on the history of vowel shortening. The premise ...
- 83.4k
6
votes
0
answers
133
views
Are Rhyming, Alliterative Verse etc. forms of linguistic Error Detection/Correction Schemes?
Rhyme (Wikipedia)
Alliterative verse (Wikipedia)
Metre - Poetry (Wikipedia)
Mechanisms such as these appear to help lower information corruption during long range communication, especially during pre-...
6
votes
0
answers
288
views
What languages use grammaticalized spoonerisms?
Here I define a "spoonerism" as the exchange of onset sounds between initially accented words in a phrase:
"sh(oving l)eopard" instead of "loving shepherd"
"f(ighting a l)iar" instead of "lighting a ...
- 718