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French conjugation, spoken vs written

French verbs are conjugated depending on the subject's person and number (ex. je parle, tu parles, il parle, etc.) However in spoken language most of these sound the same anyway because the end part of the word tend to not be pronounced (this isn't…
Louis Rhys
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Are there guides to analysing phonetic data in R?

I need references like papers/articles/books by and for people who use R for analysing phonetic data. I have Harrington's (2008) Phonetic Analysis of Speech Corpora, and it's great, but a lot of other R guides are directed at researchers in applied…
Floating Tone
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If the Rosetta stone were to be translated today, would the process be the same as used the first time?

Are there any techniques available today that would make it considerably easier to anyone attempting to translate it today (as if they were trying todo it for the first time)? Otherwise would the process be the same as it was for the first person…
jimjim
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Timescale for language divergence at ~10,000 years: Polynesian languages vs languages of the Americas?

I want to make it clear from the start that I'm not any kind of expert in linguistics or history, which is why I'm asking this question here. (Perhaps it's because of my physics background that I'm wondering about "characteristic timescales.") I've…
Jim Pivarski
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Do any languages use words like particles to represent commas, periods, hyphens, quotes, parentheses, etc.?

Wondering if any languages use words, particles, or other speakable markers to represent punctuation like periods, commas, hyphens, quotes, parentheses, question marks, exclamation marks, or potentially others (colons, etc.). For example, I think I…
Lance
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Common problems in second language pronunciation

Transfer of some phonetic/phonological features from the first language to a second language is common in second language acquisition. For example, aspiration is not phonemic in English. Voiceless plosives (/p,t,k/) in simple onsets are aspirated…
robert
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Why was India as the homeland of PIE abandoned?

I have recently become very interested in the linguistics in the problem of the Indo-Aryan migration controversy. I understand in the early 19th century India was favored as the Proto-Indo-European homeland, but then after the development of…
Linguist Enthusiast
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What is an example of a syntactic structure that can't be represented by a BNF grammar?

The tools for working with BNF grammars are a little more discoverable (ANTLR, Gold, etc) and usable than for other types of grammars. What sort of sentences can't be represented with ordinary BNF grammar rules?
MatthewMartin
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Do languages change at different rates?

Do some languages change more slowly or quickly than others? If so, what factors slow or accelerate the rate of change? (For this question, let's forget about the possible effects of modern mass media and concentrate on factors that might have…
James Grossmann
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Is there any evidence that modern telecommunication slows dialect differentiation?

Consider the area that includes Western Washington and Western Oregon. As many of us know, most English-speakers who were raised in this area speak more or less the same variety of English. Contrast this with English speakers who were raised in…
James Grossmann
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When we talk about front and back vowels in the vowel chart, does it refer to the position of the tip of the tongue or the whole body of the tongue?

This question came to me when I was trying to distinguish between [a] and [ɑ]. The former exists in my native language and the latter is the one that I'm trying to form. My question is: Since it is a back vowel does it mean that I pull the entire…
user32747
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Language that uses [t] (or [k]?) in formal settings and [k] (or [t]?) in in informal

I remember reading about some language in which both [t] and [k] were considered the same phoneme and one of the [t] and [k] were used in formal and the other in informal settings. Does such a language exist or was what I read a myth? I apologize…
Language seeker
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Is there a form descending from Latin genitive plural somewhere in modern Romance languages?

The Latin genitive plurals in -rum are very noticeable in the paradigm. Be it first declension in -ārum, second in -ōrum, or fifth in -ērum, they are heavyweight, attract accent and basicall stand out among other forms. Unfortunately, in the Romance…
Alexander Z.
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Best method for building a learner corpus for DDL

I'm looking for a set of free and (somewhat) easy tools that I can use with my EFL writing students next semester. I want to analyze their initial essays and look for common errors that can be addressed back in the classroom (hence, the DDL -…
Acornrevolution
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Is there a name for a diminutive whose meaning has decoupled from the original word?

In languages where the diminutive is productive (such as Slavic languages), many words derived as a diminutive have a meaning completely decoupled from their origin, and do not anymore "convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or a sense…
Honza Zidek
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