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1500 questions
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Do all non-syllabic, non-logographic scripts have pronounceable names for their letters for spelling?
If you ask an English speaker to spell a word, there are specific, widely-known names for all the letters to fill this need. The same appears to be true for all Phoenician-derived alphabets that I can think of, incl. Arabic, Hebrew, etc. (Although I…
Timwi
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"Overabundant nouns" in Italian: do they exist in other languages?
Under my answer to that question, I talked about a category of nouns that exist in Italian. The italian name is "Nomi sovrabbondanti" or "sostantivi sovrabbondanti", the meaning is roughly "overabundant nouns".
There are three subcategories for this…
Alenanno
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14
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Why is English so much more simplified than other, similar languages?
English seems to have rules that are much more simple than its cousin German and its influencer French, as well as most of the languages that those are related to. What caused this? I suspect it's because there is so much influence on the language…
Nick Anderegg
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14
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What is a phoneme in the context of a signed language?
A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.
SIL.
TRiG
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Why does Greek "ναι" mean "yes" while it comes from a PIE root meaning "no"?
According to Wiktionary, the Greek word ναι comes from Ancient Greek ναί, which is a variation of νή, which comes from Proto-Indo-European ne, which means no.
Why can a word have the opposite meaning to its origin? Or was Wiktionary wrong here,…
Huy Ngo
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14
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3 answers
What is a mora?
What is a mora? I tried to read the Wikipedia article that answers this question, but found it difficult to understand.
Ditto with the related LSE question: Is the concept of syllables pronunciation-relevant in languages with mora-based…
James Grossmann
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14
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5 answers
What does "generative" mean? Can a linguistic theory be non-generative?
If we ignore the political distinction "theories of those who generally agree with Chomsky" vs "theories of those who generally disagree with him" (which is better described by "Chomskian" vs "non-Chomskian/post-Chomskian"), can "generative" be…
michau
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How to distinguish a polysynthetic language from other languages? When is something a word?
For example, the probably most quoted sentence in a polysynthetic langauge (from Yupik):
tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq:
tuntu- ssur- qatar- ni- ksaite- ngqiggte- uq
reindeer- hunt- FUT- say- NEG- again- 3SG.IND
"He had not yet…
Silvus
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What's the difference between a form of a language and a dialect of a language?
I was wondering what's the difference between a form of a language and a dialect of a language?
For example, Wikipedia states that British English is a form of English and not a dialect of English.
Another page states that "Standard Singapore…
Pacerier
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14
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What does a computational linguist actually do?
Currently, I working on my application for the Bachelor of Philosophy program at Penn State to major in cognitive linguistics, but at I am also a computer science major, my advisor wants me to incorporate computational linguistics into my…
Nick Anderegg
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14
votes
1 answer
Are there ablaut changes in romance languages?
The ablaut system was in Proto-Indo-European. It also is present in some English, German and Greek. Are there ablaut changes in romance languages such as Italian, French and Spanish?
iddober
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Is there a difference between /ɕ/ and /sʲ/?
Are /ɕ/ and /ʑ/ simply shorthand for /sʲ/ and /zʲ/ as with many of the possible diacritic combinations in IPA or are they different sounds? If they are the same, is there any good reason to use one over the other? If not, how are they different?
Zifre
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Do Spanish speakers prefer certain words for certain aspects, like in Russian?
In an effort to clearly delineate durar and tardar to my Spanish students, I have been searching for some usage notes and I was not satisfied with anything I found.
Instead, I was wondering if these two words represent two aspects of the same idea,…
Ryan David Ward
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How does a linguist determine whether a pattern is grammatical in a language?
How does a linguist determine whether a pattern is grammatical in a language? Is there some kind of standard test? This is assuming that there is little documentation of the language and no authority.
For example, without documentation, corpus, or…
Louis Rhys
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What is the reason for the double negation found in some languages?
I'm a bulgarian. My language has a double negation form and I do not understand why and how can people talk like that and how it came to be in first place. Everyone just seem to accept it and no one actually questions it. Here is an…
Yordan
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