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1500 questions
15
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Is anyone studying change in constructed language?
Is there any serious work being done on linguistic change in constructed languages (e.g. Esperanto, Interlingua, Lojban)?
I would imagine it might be difficult given the small population of native speakers, but I'm always interested in attempts to…
Dan Milway
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What does Optimality Theory explain that rule-based phonology doesn't?
I understand how basic Optimality Theory (as applied to phonology) works, but I've never understood how it came into popularity. I'm guessing, though, that there are good reasons why it arose.
So what phonological patterns does Optimality Theory…
grautur
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15
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How much is known about verb regularization rates?
According to this abstract, published in 2007, "the half-life of an irregular verb scales as the square root of its usage frequency: a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast." The data that supports this study comes from…
Otavio Macedo
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Are Old French and French mutually intelligible?
In Les visiteurs (The Visitors), two Frenchman from 1123 are transported to 1993. In the movie, the visitors from 1123 can understand the speech of the modern French people in 1993, and vice versa, with minimal confusion.
Would the people speaking…
Tim S.
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15
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Derivation of the Indo-European lemma *bʰréh₂tēr ‘brother’
According to Wiktionary, the word “brother” is traced back to the reconstructed Indo-European lemma *bʰréh₂tēr with the same meaning.
It seems to be structurally similar to other kinship terms, such as *ph₂tḗr “father”, *méh₂tēr “mother” and…
Lypyrhythm
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15
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Are there any natural languages in which /ʂ/ and /ʃ/ are distinct phonemes?
I'm having a difficult time trying to find languages that have a phonemic contrast between /ʂ/ and /ʃ/.
I can hear the difference without difficulty because /ʂ/ sounds like a lower frequency range of noise than /ʃ/ does.
According to the paper "A…
James Grossmann
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15
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If the Arabic script is suited to Arabic grammar, how do speakers of non-Semitic languages cope with it?
The Arabic script is an Abjad writing system or consonantal alphabet. Most letters stand for a consonant, and short vowels are usually not indicated (but can exceptionally be indicated with diacritic symbols). Long vowels also have proper letters,…
robert
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Why Korean transcriptions of Japanese words uses the letters ㄱ,ㄷ,ㅈ for initial /k/, /t/, /tɕ/ while using ㅋ,ㅌ,ㅊ for other languages?
Looking at Korean transcription rules for Japanese, I noticed that for some consonants, the hangul transcription would change if it was in the initial position:
https://kornorms.korean.go.kr//regltn/regltnView.do?regltn_code=0003#a
カ /ka/ is…
kanazoshi
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Are any of the isolating languages of East Asia showing signs of gaining inflections?
It's generally accepted that languages go through a cycle of changes to their morphological type.
English is losing its inflectional endings and becoming more isolating/analytic.
But what about the big well known isolating/analytic languages, are…
hippietrail
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Can you give me some tips on how to pronounce ejective consonants?
I'll be going back to the Republic of Georgia pretty soon and will try to learn the famously difficult language but last time I was there I couldn't distinguish or reproduce the ejectives.
Everybody understood me anyway but I'd really like to nail…
hippietrail
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15
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Why does Polish have male and female accents?
This is particularly interesting to me as I can't seem to find any information on the topic, but, having listened to numerous Polish speakers from both sexes, the male─female pronounciational split is very distinctive to my Russian ears.
In…
Max
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Why do Arabic names still have their meanings?
As someone born in Britain whose first language is English, but with origins in Pakistan and an understanding of both Punjabi and Arabic, it's always seemed to me that most modern Arabic names are easily understandable by those who understand…
Hashim Aziz
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Can Hangul be read as fast as Chinese?
I read that Chinese can be read 7% faster than English. Can Hangul also be read 7% faster than English?
Reason to think "no":
While Hangul and Chinese both have roughly one character per syllable, the Chinese characters might convey more…
Max Heiber
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Automatically Converting Natural Language to First-Order Logic
I'm trying to find a way to automatically convert arbitrary natural language sentences into first-order logic predicates. Although complex, this seems to be feasible to me, through inverse lambda calculus; one of the biggest downsides of this…
izilotti
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15
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Can loudness of speech sounds influence meaning?
In Chinese, words can have different meanings if their tones are changed, e.g. 是 (shì) and 十 (shí). In Italian, words can have different meanings if a consonant is geminated, e.g. sete and sette.
My question is: is there any language whose words can…
GA1
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