Unanswered Questions
101 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
8
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1
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585
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Which languages have zero markers of comparative degree that coexist with non-zero comparative markers?
The zero comparative marker and the non-zero one should be more or less interchangeable. (The etymology of the non-zero marker doesn't matter.)
(A message asking to list such languages was originally ...
7
votes
0
answers
170
views
Are there any languages where the first person cannot be an object?
In some languages, nouns low on the animacy hierarchy, particularly inanimates cannot surface as A, and if a situation arises where they are underlyingly A, some reparative strategy such as a passive ...
- 6,337
6
votes
0
answers
109
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Are there any languages with second-person pronouns marked for a proximal/distal distinction?
I am curious if there are any natural languages where the personal pronoun used to refer to the addressee varies in some way depending on their distance to the speaker. For instance, one form might be ...
- 161
6
votes
0
answers
313
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How did Old Norse influence Old English to lose genders and cases?
Wikipedia says that "Norse influence is ... considered to have stimulated and accelerated the morphological simplification found in Middle English, such as the loss of grammatical gender and ...
CommunityBot
- 1
6
votes
0
answers
595
views
Comparative markers coming from low degree markers ("attenuatives")? (List such languages.)
Which languages have a marker of the comparative degree of adjectives that coincides with a marker of a low degree? ...or which has evolved from such a low degree marker?
(A message asking for the ...
6
votes
1
answer
296
views
Reference request: ways of indicating disagreement
There are lots of ways to indicate you disagree with some aspect of an utterance. I'm thinking here of the spectrum that includes "No, not-X," "Well, not-X," "Hey, wait a minute! Not-X!" "Yes, you're ...
CommunityBot
- 1
5
votes
0
answers
159
views
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
5
votes
0
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62
views
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
5
votes
0
answers
1k
views
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 ...
- 31.1k
5
votes
0
answers
107
views
What is the historical-linguistic origin of the high variety of the Burmese language?
In Myanmar (Burma), a state of diglossia exists.
How did the high (formal) variety originate historically? Did it use to have native speakers at some point in the historical development of the ...
- 51
5
votes
1
answer
142
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Is there a recognized foremost social factor from which idioms are derived?
I've heard some people posit that the reason a large amount of idioms in American English come from sports terminology (e.g. "ballpark figure" or "the whole nine yards") is due to the "competitive ...
4
votes
0
answers
78
views
Is there any place in the US where the Northern Cities Vowel Shift is not reversed among young speakers?
The Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS) is a chain shift of vowels affecting six vowels in the Inland Northern United States during the twentieth century. This sound change progressed and spread ...
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4
votes
0
answers
118
views
Are there languages where grammatical parallelism does not matter?
English has a strong preference for parallelism (Wikipedia link), even though sentences lacking parallelism are still considered grammatically correct:
Good:
She likes cooking, jogging, and reading.
...
- 1,140
4
votes
0
answers
339
views
Are there languages that mark mood but not tense or aspect?
Are there languages where verbs inflect for mood but don't inflect for tense and aspect?
For instance, if a language had one set of indicative forms and another set of subjunctive forms, but didn't ...
- 6,337
4
votes
0
answers
68
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Can the shift in grammatical usage of "an X-ese [person]" be explained linguistically?
While reading An Introduction to Information Theory by John R. Pierce, I was distracted by a linguistic artifact (on page 251 of the second edition):
We can tell our friends apart, […] but we find ...
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