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1500 questions
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Are there other pairs of languages that are as close grammatically despite not being in the same language family as Korean and Japanese?
Though there are many theories grouping Korean and Japanese in the same family, none of these are widely accepted by linguists.
Yet the grammars of these two languages are extremely similar in many ways:
topic + comment
word order
use of…
hippietrail
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At what point does a language become its descendant?
With the possible exceptions of constructed languages, languages seem to evolve. As a real-world example, we note that Latin has evolved into Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.
What defines the transition between an ancestor…
Jeff Zeitlin
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Did Ancient Greek have a rising intonation for questions?
Unlike English, Ancient (e.g. Attic) Greek does not reorder words to formulate a question. The particle "ἆρα" does modify a statement into a question, but is not always present. In that case, I presume there would have been a way for native speakers…
A-K
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Did Georgian ever have a native word for "dolphin"?
During my time in Georgia one word came to puzzle me and I'm still thinking about it:
დელფინი (delp'ini) "dolphin"
Wiktionary says this comes from Greek via Russian.
The thing is Georgia is on the Black Sea which has plenty of dolphins so why…
hippietrail
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What is the current understanding of Greenberg's classification of African languages?
In a reply to the criticism of his classification of the languages of the Americas, Greenberg (1989: 107) characterized his work on African languages as follows:
[...] my classification is clearly the basis of present-day African historical…
user444
15
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3 answers
Whispered Voiced Consonants
Is there a difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants when whispering, which as I understand it, does not use the vocal cords? I know it sounds silly to ask because we can all understand whispered speech, but I wonder how much is…
Double AA
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Why are Chinese punctuation marks 。and 、so similar to its western style equivalents?
I've been trying to understand what are the rules for using Chinese punctuation symbols and I stumbled upon this article, which states that:
For instance, a Song Dynasty print of Chronicles of Huayang used
full-width spaces to denote a stop,[4]…
GA1
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The Origin of the Word 'God'
I originally posted this a while ago on my blog, but someone recently suggested that I pose it as a question here.
A brief Wikipedia search on the origin of the word ‘god’ reveals the following:
The earliest written form of the Germanic word god…
Dov F
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In Japanese, why do certain consonants change depending on the vowel?
I was wondering why in Japanese, certain consonants change depending on the vowel. For example:
Consonants that do not change:
ka / ki / ku / ke / ko
na / ni / nu / ne / no
Consonants that do change:
sa / shi / su / se / so
ta / chi / tsu / te /…
Alan C
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If two syllables in Mandarin have the same vowels but different tones, can the syllables be said to rhyme?
If two syllables in Mandarin have the same vowels but different tones, can the syllables be said to rhyme according to native speakers?
I was tempted to ask this question about all tone languages, but realized that the criteria for rhyming might…
James Grossmann
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Is the very concept of the phoneme disputed?
I believe there was some important research published in recent decades which brought a fundamental change to the way linguists think about phonemes.
Or is it that the concept of the phoneme has always been contentious despite its seeming wide…
hippietrail
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4 answers
Can one's native medium of language be written, rather than spoken or signed?
(This is probably a poorly-formed question, but I'm really just trying to find out if there's any research in this area.)
Most children pick up a spoken or signed language at an early age, and this gets referred to as their native language. Can a…
Joe
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What is the minimal set of words that make a language "complete"?
In programming languages, there is a concept of turing completeness - whenever a system reaches "turing completeness", it is capable of emulating any programming language and, thus, as expressive as them. It is not hard to be turing-complete: very…
MaiaVictor
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Italian past participle ending -uto
Why, in the paradigm for Italian past participles ending in -ere, does the regular past participle end in -uto? Whence the vowel, when the other two paradigms have -ato and -ito?
jogloran
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Could we rank languages, saying one is superior to the other?
Now and then I am faced with claims that language A is better than B, because of some grammar rules or words or ...
But is there really a standard or a method to analyse a language from different perspectives and then rank it?
Possibly: (suggestions…
azerafati
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