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Does lip movement in Turkish sign language have a grammatical feature?
Apart from manuals, also nonmanuals; such as head tilt or head shake have grammatical features in Turkish sign languages. They appear while asking questions or giving negation.
Some lip movements are seen while people sign. I know that they do this…
Serpil Karabüklü
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How do linguists find the etymology?
I was wondering, what is the method (or the methods) that linguists adopt to understand and know the etymology of a word?
Are these methods reliable and in what measure?
The knowledge I have on the matter is not that deep so I wanted to know exactly…
Alenanno
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What is the Mongolian vowel separator for?
I've heard of the Mongolian vowel separator from programmers, who regard it as an interesting quirk in Unicode. When I google for it, most of the hits are from those revelling in its geekiness.
But as someone dabbling a bit in Mongolian, I'd like to…
Golden Cuy
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What are the reasons to count Armenian as an Indo-European language?
Often I encounter arguments that Armenian is in fact not an Indo-European language. The claims assert that the regular correspondences between Armenian and PIE are too unrealistic, too rare and too irregular. The basic vocabulary is quite different,…
Anixx
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14
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Languages with a 12th Basic Color Term
Is the 12th Basic Color Term (BCT) always light blue as in Russian “голубой” (goluboy) and Italian “azzurro” or are there languages in which the 12th BCT is different? Which languages have a 12th BCT?
Lucas
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13
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Is there any case of a "convergent language family"?
As far as I know, language families originate from a process of divergent, tree-like evolution. All the languages within a family or subfamily can be traced back to the same proto-language, which was spoken several centuries ago. At some point, the…
Otavio Macedo
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To what extent has Martha's Vineyard SL been reconstructed?
Martha's Vineyard had a large deaf population and a native sign language. I read that this had been partially reconstructed by looking at the differences between ASL and LSF, as modern ASL is basically LSF with a strong MVSL influence.
TRiG
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What is the difference between a word root and a word stem?
What is the difference between a word's root and a word's stem?
bernie2436
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Why does "half" not follow the pattern of ordinal numbers across languages?
The cardinal "a half" is unrelated to "two", whereas "a third", "a quarter" (and certainly "a fourth"), etc. are related to "three", "four", etc. This seems to be true in other languages, too, in various language families:
Portuguese metade but…
msh210
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Languages with multiple forms of the verb "to be"
Many languages have multiple forms of the verb "to be". For example, Spanish has ser and estar, while Nepali has हो and छ. Some other examples are given in this nice blog post. My question is: what other languages have multiple forms of "to be", and…
Jimeree
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What's the difference between accusative, unaccusative, ergative, and unergative?
What does it mean for a language or verb to be one or the other of these typologies (examples would help)? Can it be more than one at once?
user325
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3 answers
How to prepare for the International Linguistics Olympiad
What are the best resources (online or books) to prepare for the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL)?
Phira
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Is there an active alphabetic writing system not based on the Phoenician or the Brahmic lineage?
The vast majority of alphabetic writing systems are part of the Phoenician lineage (e.g. Latin, Cyrillic and friends) or Brahmic (Devanagari and friends). Is there an active alphabetic system outside these two families. I found it surprising if…
Louis Rhys
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How different were the Tangut and Khitan logographic scripts derived from Chinese Hanzi from Hanzi?
Japanese uses a writing system called Kanji, which is a moderated version of Chinese Hanzi. The Kanji characters are similar to or often the same as the corresponding Chinese character, with the same meaning. Koreans and Vietnamese had similar…
Dagvadorj
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How are languages and dialects distinguished from one another?
Are there any cases where two varieties of the same language are treated as separate languages, or where two distinct languages are treated as varieties of the same language. If so, why?
blunders
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