Unanswered Questions
324 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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Is English Unique in having so Many Animal Words?
In English, it is common for a multiple words to refer to animals of the same taxon differently depending on sex, age, or other factors. For example:
Taxon: Horse
Reproductive Adult Male: Stallion
...
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71
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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 ...
- 29
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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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25
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Description of meaning of Phoible record properties
Phoible is a repository of cross-linguistic phonological inventory data, and it has data like this (JS object):
{
InventoryID: '2325',
Glottocode: 'ligu1248',
ISO6393: 'lij',
LanguageName: '...
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A claimed physics of a mysterious letter (Arabic)
The pronunciation of the Arabic letter Dhad (ض) has sparked considerable debate, especially regarding its articulation in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Traditionally described as a fricative lateral ...
- 31.1k
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69
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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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43
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Is Old Church Slavonic съпрѧтьнъ (sŭprętĭnŭ) descending from PIE *sprend-, *sprendʰ- *sper- (“to flinch; jump”)?
It has always intrigued me that the rather popular Romanian word sprinten (swift, fast, lively) seems very close semantically to English sprint.
The etymology of the English word is rather detailed on ...
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130
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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 ...
- 374
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69
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Are there linguistic maps/infographs of the typology of the manifestation of stress
On WALS, Chapters about stress:
14 Fixed Stress Locations
15 Weight-Sensitive Stress
16 Weight Factors in Weight-Sensitive Stress Systems
17 Rhythm Types
It is much much more difficult to define ...
- 374
4
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What is the origin of the short future tense of imperfective verbs in Ukrainian (e.g. "читатиму" instead of "буду читати")?
The other Slavic languages I know of require a construction of "<future form of "be"> + verb" (which is also permitted in Ukrainian), so I suspect it is a new evolution and ...
- 31.1k
3
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98
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Darwin's "I am" example
In The Descent of Man when comparing biological evolution to linguistic evolution, Darwin discusses the concept of 'linguistic fossils' (rudiments):
"The frequent presence of rudiments, both in ...
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45
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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 ...
- 53
3
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73
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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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2
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127
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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
6
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1
answer
127
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Do Chinese's time words come from its writing systems?
Chinese was traditionally written top-to-bottom. The Chinese word for next (in phrases like next week, next time, next page, etc.) is 下 (xià) which also means under.
The Chinese word for previous/last ...
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