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Draconis's user avatar
Draconis's user avatar
Draconis
Moderator
  • Member for 8 years, 11 months
  • Last seen this week
168 votes
Accepted

Why did Old English lose both thorn and eth?

86 votes

Why do English transliterations of Arabic names have so many Qs in them?

81 votes
Accepted

Is English tonal for some words, like "permit"?

77 votes

What is the term for this derivation: "Cheeseburger comes from Hamburger" but... the word hamburger didn't refer to ham

74 votes
Accepted

Is Sanskrit really the mother of all languages?

64 votes
Accepted

Were ancient languages as sophisticated as modern languages?

58 votes
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Is it unusual that English uses possessive for past tense?

52 votes
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Days of the week in Yiddish -- why so similar to Germanic?

47 votes
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How did the generic masculine emerge?

46 votes
Accepted

Why isn't "I've" a proper response?

45 votes

Since when did Indo-European languages start associating noun genders with male/female sexes?

42 votes
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Are there modern languages without standardized spelling? If not, why?

42 votes

How did שְׁלֹמֹה (shlomo) become Solomon?

41 votes
Accepted

Is the Cyrillic letter 'Z' the same as the number 3

40 votes
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Is future tense in English really a myth?

37 votes
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Are language and thought the same?

36 votes
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Why are J, U, W considered part of the basic Latin Alphabet?

36 votes
Accepted

Why isn't there a letter for /b/ sound in Greek alphabet while they have the sound?

35 votes
Accepted

Why do the Romance languages use definite articles, when Latin doesn't?

35 votes
Accepted

Why vowels sound different from each other

34 votes
Accepted

Do any languages use words like particles to represent commas, periods, hyphens, quotes, parentheses, etc.?

33 votes
Accepted

Why do even completely illiterate persons, who speak their national language poorly, speak their local dialect with perfection?

33 votes

Why do most languages have a different form for singular vs plural nouns?

33 votes

What linguistic evidence is there in support of/in opposition to the account of the Tower of Babel?

32 votes

Why are the orthographies of Ancient/Proto Languages so Impractical?

32 votes
Accepted

What do you call an IPA symbol that lacks a name (e.g. ɲ)?

30 votes

Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?

30 votes

How does the nonsense word "frabjous" conform to English phonotactics?

30 votes

Why were writing systems invented independently during roughly the same period across multiple civilizations?

29 votes

Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?

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