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1500 questions
18
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3 answers
What are difficulties linguists have run into with common fonts?
Recently I've resumed work on a font I'm currently developing, meant to be released as a completely free, open-source, OFL-licensed font designed specifically for use in academic and formal writing.
Besides being free and open source, it aims to…
Emily
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18
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Why did the consonant clusters /ks/ and /ps/ merit their own designated letters in Ancient Greek?
Ancient Greek had many consonant clusters, like /pn/ in pneuma, /bd/ in bdellion, and /pt/ in pteron. But for some reason, /ks/ (ξ) and /ps/ (ψ) received special real estate in the 24-letter Greek alphabet. What was the logic behind this decision?…
Fomalhaut
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18
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Are there languages with more vowels than consonants?
Almost all languages of the world have more consonants than vowels. Are there some languages of the world with more vowel phonemes than consonants?
Sir Cornflakes
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Is it possible to predict language changes?
The comparative method is used to reconstruct unattested languages from the attested ones. By comparing different sounds for the same words in various sister languages, it is possible to infer some phonological rules. The internal reconstruction…
Otavio Macedo
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18
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Is there a favoured data structure for storing ambiguous parse trees in Natural Language Processing?
I know a bit about parsing computer languages. Generally they try to resolve all ambiguities when parsing or abort the parse and throw an error.
This means you either got nothing because there was an error, or you have a neat syntax tree / AST with…
hippietrail
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18
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Why do we use the names we do for grammatical genders?
Imagine if every French speaker suddenly agreed that nouns were one of 'animate' and 'inanimate', or 'chocolate' and 'strawberry', or 'A' and 'B' instead of 'masculine' and 'feminine'. The language could go on being used identically to how it was…
AML
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18
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Are there modern languages without standardized spelling? If not, why?
Historically, English did not have standardized spelling; see e.g. this paragraph from the Washington Post:
At one point, English speakers lived in a world without standardized spelling. According to the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English,…
dbmag9
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18
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4 answers
Why were writing systems invented independently during roughly the same period across multiple civilizations?
Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years, and spoken language is believed to have been around for 50,000 to 150,000 years.
Writing is a relatively new phenomenon. According to this source, writing is believed to have originated independently…
J Li
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18
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Introducing 1 more language to a trilingual baby at home
I am a French mum who has a 2 year old baby. My husband is Swedish and at home we speak English. Our son is already speaking French and Swedish and some English. We speak a bit of English with him everyday when the 3 of us are together.
The thing is…
GEM
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Why do even completely illiterate persons, who speak their national language poorly, speak their local dialect with perfection?
Disclaimers: I have no linguistic knowledge whatsoever, I'm just fascinated by these subjects. Also, I will use the word "dialect" due to my lack of a better word, although I see that the description of the "dialects" tag talks about "mutually…
SantiBailors
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18
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3 answers
Meaning of star/asterisk in linguistics
In some dictionaries/lexica, I've seen the asterisk in front of old words. What does it mean/stand for?
Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic#Pre-Proto-Germanic
*ǵʰóstis "stranger" > *gʰóstis > *gastiz "guest"
feeela
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Are language and thought the same?
I want to know whether language and thought are the same.
I think language enriches one's thought and thought helps one to use language better. Without language how could man think? Did they have inner language which helped them to think?
I…
Jvlnarasimharao
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18
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2 answers
Origin of h as a modifier letter
A silly what-if question that sounds a bit mad: I am curious as to why the letter "H" in English and some other European languages is used as a modifier to make diglyphs represent a single phoneme (ch, sh, th, dh, kh, gh etc.).
I cannot figure out…
Matteo Ferla
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4 answers
True languages that pirates spoke
Ahoy, me hearties!
As many of you may already know, today is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Since I find the historical subject of piracy quite interesting, specially after reading Pirate Utopias, I would like to bring up the discussion. Pirate Utopias…
rberaldo
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18
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When did other slavic nations adopt the Latin-inspired look of printed Cyrillic pioneered in Russia?
Russian Emperor Peter I famously reformed the Cyrillic script in Russia, where, among other changes, he redesigned the letterforms to more closely resemble the look of the modern Latin script.
Here is what printed Cyrillic (set in the Poluustav…
Arnold
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