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What is known or believed about the origin of Semitic-type root-and-template morphology?
How does nonconcatenative morphology of the Semitic type (consonantal roots, vocalic templates + affixes) arise diachronically?
It's pretty easy to see how a nonconcatenative inflectional system could morph into a more typical, concatenative system:…
TKR
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What are some examples of recent studies investigating strong linguistic determinism?
One of the most controversial ideas put forth in linguistics is the idea of linguistic determinism. Also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it states that people who speak different languages would also have different mental models of the world.…
Otavio Macedo
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Why do tone and simple syllable structure appear to be correlated?
I happen to have been struggling to learn a bit of Mandarin Chinese lately, and it's been my first attempt to really deal with tones to any significant extent. I find distinguishing tones quite difficult -- in fact, I find that trying to get tones…
pat
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13
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Why does the name of the flower 'Forget-me-not' have the same meaning in other languages?
The flower forget-me-not is named "Vergissmeinnicht" in German and "Незабудка" in Russian. The meaning is the same in all three languages. Is this a coincidence?
Amelse Etomer
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13
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Ontological status of syntactic transformations
Syntactic theories in the generative tradition involve transformations, i.e. movement of constituents, between deep structure and surface structure. What is actually meant by this? Is it intended as a model of the linguistic mind, a metaphor, or…
TKR
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13
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Unexplained /ɪl/ /ɛl/ phenomenon in American English
(I hope all this background information I’m about to give is relevant.) I’m a teenager from the north side of Chicago with a mostly unplaceable General American accent. I have some general tendencies characteristic of the Inland North (no cot-caught…
Graham H.
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Do non-tonal languages evolve into tonal languages?
I have read that the language in China did not always use tones or was less reliant on them. Native speakers have emphasized to me how much more compactly the same idea can be expressed in Mandarin than in English.
Is there evidence that English is…
releseabe
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What's the difference between a syllabic consonant and a schwa followed by a consonant?
I'm a native speaker of a language which has syllabic consonants, here are the examples
კლდე/k'lde, [kʼl̩dɛ] "cliff"
ქრთამი/krtami, [kʰɾ̩tʰami] "bribe"
ბრძენი/brdzeni, [bɾ̩d͡zɛni] "Wise"
And to my ears they all sound like [kʼᵊldɛ] [kʰᵊɾtʰami] and…
LinguisticsFanatic
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Why are there grammars in languages in the first place?
I recently took an interest in linguistics and is currently working through the various interesting phenomenon like x bar theory, wh-movement, binding theory, etc. It all sounds very fascinating to me. It amazes me that simple speeches are governed…
jxhyc
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13
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Why is tense obligatory in some languages and not in others?
In some languages like Chinese, it isn’t imperative that the tense of the verb is explicitly marked. So if you mean an action that will occur in the future, you can still refer to it in an all-encompassing way with a “present” form.
But in English,…
Julius Hamilton
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Is there a name for the type of word that the word, “scarecrow,” is? (a transitive verb conjoined with its object)
The English word, “scarecrow,” spontaneously came to mind the other day, and I realized just how similar this word is to other words and phrases in other languages.
For example, there are many commonly used nouns in Spanish that are formed by…
dry_apricot_09
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How did Greek loanwords with 'ae' come to be pronounced [i] in modern English?
There are a bunch of Greek loanwords in English that orthographically include the vowel sequence 'ae'. Examples include:
aegis
aether
aeon
The 'ae' vowel here is pronounced [i] in English, but at least according to those Wikipedia pages, it was…
A_S00
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How do purely statistical machine translators deal with different word orders?
Even relatively closely related languages can differ greatly in word order. Take English and German for instance.
English is pretty boringly subject-verb-object whereas in German the finite verb must come second, all other verbs go to the end, and…
hippietrail
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Any languages that consider the alveolar and uvular trill distinct consonant phonemes?
I am intrigued by the difference between alveolar and uvular trills (and related phones) within and across languages, e.g., per this map of European /r/ usage (taken from this comment), which seems to be one of the harder things to teach in foreign…
Stephan Kolassa
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Why are J, U, W considered part of the basic Latin Alphabet?
J, U, W are included in ISO basic Latin alphabet which consists of 26 letters. However,
The classic Latin has only 23 letters, and J was only used as a variant of I as σ do to ς.
J, U were not distinguished from I, V in Europe until late Medieval,…
Schezuk
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