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6 answers
Why did England not maintain French as a spoken language?
In many countries around the world, especially in Africa, the people natively speak both an indigenous language and French due to French colonization.
The Norman conquest of England left us with many, many French words and grammatical structures,…
Nick Anderegg
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Why is 1/12 called an "uncia" in Latin?
The Latin word uncia (which is the origin of the English word ounce) denotes 1/12 of a pound. Does anybody know the etymology of this word?
Shouldn’t it be something more like *docia, or anything starting with a d? Uncia sounds more like 1/11.
Wolfram Jahn
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Do any Indo European languages reflect noun class types other than gender?
In the comments of another question about animate as noun gender in some Slavic languages an interesting point was raised.
Many if not most Indo European languages exhibit grammatical gender for nouns. Also it's known that for many other languages…
hippietrail
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When were there the most languages?
A friend recently asked me this simple and fascinating question.
At what point in history were there the largest number of human
languages?
Although a really precise answer needs a clear definition of a "language", I still find the question very…
Simd
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16
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Origin of articles in European languages
I read that PIE, Latin, old English, and even old German did not use articles, yet current English, German and Romance languages all use articles.
Is it true that articles developed in all these languages independently from the word for "one"? What…
Martin Konicek
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Why do stem-changing verbs have a vowel change in Spanish?
It may just be that I'm demonstrating my gross ignorance, but I can't seem to find a 'why' for stem-changing verbs in Spanish. I understand that there is some sort of perceived weakness in the vowel that is emphasized by the addition of stress to…
jrob
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16
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Do any languages have kinship terms for the relationship between the respective parents of a married couple?
Do any languages have kinship terms for the relationship between each pair of parents of a married couple? For example, how would a husband’s mother refer to the wife’s mother?
Do any of the kinship classes typically have a specific term for this…
Mad Banners
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Is there a diagram showing the history of sound changes from Latin to the Romance languages?
We have had a number of questions about sound changes, asking for the history of specific changes. See this one, for example: asking about the change from Latin benedictionem to French beneiçon. Often, as the original poster of that question…
Otavio Macedo
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Does an IPA to 'English' translator exist?
IPA is really tricky to read, especially for beginners like me.
Are there any online tools that can almost 'convert' pasted IPA into phonetic pronunciations or similar?
I've tried Wolfram|Alpha which doesn't seem to understand IPA, and a Google…
Jack
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Do all languages have sentences?
This is a pretty basic question I guess, but anyway.
Do all (human) languages have sentences?
Most linguistic articles I read assume so, but can we take this as an assumption?
Karel Bílek
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Are nouns ever a closed class?
For pretty much any grammatical category, I can think of a language in which it's a closed class. Japanese has closed classes of verbs and (verb-like) adjectives, for example, while Swahili has a closed class of (noun-like) adjectives.
However, I…
Draconis
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Is there practical application of X' theory in natural language processing?
I was taught X' theory in generative grammar lectures, only to find out that NLP uses mainly simpler grammars, such as HPSG or statistical models such as hidden Markov models.
Is X' of any use for NLP at its current state of the art?
Evpok
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16
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How to split IPA spelling into syllables
First, please forgive my ignorance, I'm completely new to linguistics.
Given the IPA spelling for word, is it possible to programmatically split it into its sounds? So, for example, given the word "ingredient" and it's IPA spelling "ɪn'gridiənt",…
skedly
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Are Hungarian and Turkish related?
I was told by somebody who has lived near Hungary that she thought that Hungarian and Turkish were related, and that their languages are very similar. A brief google search seems to support this.
However, that article does say that this grouping is…
user23398
16
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5 answers
Are Written and Spoken English distinct languages?
First of all, I am not a linguist, but I was thinking the other night that being literate was almost the same as being bilingual.
My reasoning is that sign language is distinct from written and spoken English, and sign language is a "visual"…
John Gietzen
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