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1500 questions
12
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6 answers
What is minimalist about the minimalist program?
The minimalist program seems to be very fashionable amongst linguists at present, but for the life of me I can't understand its appeal.
As far as I can see - and I've read my fair share of the literature by now - there is little minimalist about…
player.mdl
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What are some resources that I can use to gather Twitter data for an NLP project?
I was going to use the Edinburgh Twitter Corpus that is referenced in this paper: The Edinburgh Twitter Corpus. But apparently Twitter has changed their Terms and the corpus is no longer available. Every other Twitter dataset I can find is…
Mark Tuttle
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What's the 'official' term for when a word is at the tip of your tongue?
If I remember correctly from the half year I studied linguistics, there is a sort of official name for the situation or state your brain (or your speech center) is in when a word is at the tip of your tongue but you can't quite think of what it was…
Zsub
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Is there a long list of languages whose writing systems don't use spaces?
Some languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Khmer use writing systems that don't use spaces.
What are other such languages?
Is there a list of these languages?
alvas
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12
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5 answers
Examples of convergent evolution?
As an English-speaking student of Yiddish, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the indefinite article was an before vowels and a before consonants, just like in English. But as far as I can tell, Yiddish developed this independently from…
Anschel Schaffer-Cohen
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12
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6 answers
What is a comprehensive recent discussion of the status of Chomsky's universal grammar theory?
In particular, I am interested in the suggested common features of creole languages more or less grammaticalized by children.
Phira
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12
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Agglutinative vs. Analytic. What's the difference?
First of all, I understand that these typological distinctions are not absolute and almost all languages show signs of almost all morphological strategies but most display a certain tendency towards one or the other.
I also understand that…
cyco130
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12
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Bar-Hillel's critique of machine translation 50 years later
More than fifty years ago, philosopher Yehoshua Bar-Hillel wrote wrote an influential paper about computerized translation entitled: A Demonstration of the Nonfeasibility of Fully Automatic High Quality Translation (see also this TIME magazine…
Gil Kalai
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12
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4 answers
Which languages other than Chinese have apical vowels?
Which languages other than some Chinese languages have apical vowels? The "apical vowels" are the i in zi, ci, si (in IPA: z̩ (also seen as ɿ)) and ʐ̩ (also seen as ʅ). They are basically buzzed sounds after certain consonants.
Ming-Tang
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12
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1 answer
Can English syntax alone tell apart a person's background?
I was wondering if English syntax alone can tell apart a person's background? For example, if two strangers are exchanging texts - without looking at their spelling, word choices etc, just by the English syntax alone could they possibly tell where…
teledipsy
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12
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3 answers
Is a loanword also a cognate or are the two terms mutually exclusive?
A borrowing or loanword is when a word from language A is added to the lexicon of language B, with whatever phonological adaptations are necessary.
But is a cognate only a word directly inherited from an ancestor language, or is it correct to say…
hippietrail
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12
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2 answers
What non-Semitic languages have templatic non-concatenative morphology?
Which languages, if any, outside of Semitic have something like Semitic-style root-and-template morphology, with roots that can be analyzed as consisting of consonants only, and the vowels coming from a separate morphological tier? I've heard that…
TKR
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Why isn't the American r considered a vowel?
As a native American English speaker from the Northwest, whenever I isolate the r in words like "right" or "rope" it's always /ɚ/, the same as the r in words like "first" or "girl" but the "ir" in first and girl is considered an r-colored vowel, but…
Wesley Inselman
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12
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7 answers
Why doesn’t a language modernization initiative adopt pure phonetic spelling?
Given that there are language associations that work to standardize languages’ orthography, vocabulary, grammar, etc., why is it not more common to use phonetically accurate spelling?
Julius Hamilton
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12
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Is the rarity of dental sounds explained by babies not immediately having teeth?
Dental consonants, which involve the corona of the tongue contacting the teeth (typically the upper teeth) are known to be rare throughout the world’s languages. More specifically, phonemic distinction between dental and alveolar consonants of the…
Graham H.
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