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1500 questions
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Does the letter p in a word mean that the word is not Germanic?
In Germanic languages, the p sound in Proto-Indo-European became f. I have wondered if the p sound means that the word does not come from a Germanic source. This is because words that have p in them usually come from Latin. Does the presence of that…
Hodge
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Is there any agglutinative Indo-European language?
It seems like Indo-European languages are always stuck between throwing away complicated fusional grammar (like English) or retaining most of it (like Russian). Are there any Indo-European languages that reanalyzed the verb system into agglutination…
ithisa
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Are there languages where a change of character casing can lead to a different meaning of a word?
I'm no expert on linguistics. In fact I'm no even a proper amateur but please, bear with me on this: Are there any languages where a word would change its meaning depending on the casing of one or more of its letters?
In German for example I can…
Mats
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Why does Spanish tend to swap letters in words?
I can't remember the source, but I recall hearing that Spanish (my native tongue) tends to swap letters in words (accidentally). Examples
Latin diabolo becomes diablo(o). (perhaps this is a non-example, and it is losing an 'o' instead.)
French…
Pedro
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14
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When did Hebrew start replacing Yiddish?
I’ve always considered the transition to have started in the beginning of the 20th century, when the Ben-Yehuda’s works became pretty prominent. If I recall correctly, the first seminary where Hebrew was a subject was opened in 1904.
Yet, recently…
Zhiltsoff Igor
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Is English unusual in having no second person plural form?
In Spanish, there are the "vosotros" (only used in Spain) and "ustedes" (formal in Spain) forms for use when talking to a group of people. These also use specific conjugations different different from the regular single "tú" or "usted" (formal)…
Stormblessed
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Is linguistic change pushed by humor?
Through "meme culture," young people are inventing all sorts of new linguistic constructions purely because they think they sound funny. The interesting thing is that these jokes don't end at a definite point. What makes a joke a "meme" is that it…
Raf Vosté
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14
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Is there a modern survey on the Altaic theory?
Back in 1999, there was a great paper co-authored by anti-Altaicist Stefan Georg with some Altaicists that gave the history of the Altaic theory, gathered up all of the evidence, and tried to work out what the substantive questions were and who was…
abarnert
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Whispering in languages heavily dependent on pitch or phonation distinctions
When whispering in English all (segmental) phonological distinctions can – as far as I am aware – still be made, which may be due to redundancy (or simply because voicing is optional). I even pronounce whispered homorganic fricatives like /v : f/…
unknown_person_1000
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Are there any languages which inflect the noun for morphosyntactic categories normally reserved for verbs (e.g. tense, aspect, etc.)?
In English (for example), we say "I go/went/was going/etc.", inflecting the verb for tense and aspect while leaving the subject of the sentence unchanged. But are there any languages that would instead inflect the noun/pronoun? For example, suppose…
ubadub
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What is the past tense of 'yeet'?
Yeet (/ji:t/) is a recently coined verb in English that seems to have taken on the characteristics of a strong verb, as seen in this hilarious urban dictionary definition.
In English, the strong verb system is no longer productive and has almost…
ⰲⱁⰴⰰ
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What parts of speech / word classes do languages most frequently lack?
Among conlangers, AllNoun is a notable syntax because it only makes use one part of speech / word class, which is analagous to nouns. A natural language I've heard of (but I can't remember or find a reference to it anywhere, I think it was an…
Peter Olson
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Vowel harmony in Spanish?
Some irregular Spanish verbs with infinite in "-ir" seem to have an interesting pattern in their conjugation:
For some verbs with "o" as last vowel in the infinite stem (e.g. dormir, morir), the form of the last stem vowel in conjugated forms seem…
dainichi
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Which modern, spoken languages do not use the decimal number system?
Rationale: While writing a document about foundations of computer science and describing that a number is a sequence of digits, I was wondering about our relation to the decimal system.
In English counting goes like this: "one", "two" and "three".…
meisterluk
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14
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6 answers
How to distinguish Korean "ㅔ" /e/ and "ㅐ" /ɛ/?
I've always had trouble with the distinction between the "e"-like vowels in European languages: /e/ vs /ɛ/. But pronouncing them the same has never caused me any problems.
In fact I don't even know whether my English "short e" is /e/ vs /ɛ/. I seem…
hippietrail
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