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1500 questions
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Is there a standardized graphical encoding for cuneiform?
If I want to describe the Hittite version of the DIŊIR cuneiform glyph, I could say "a double-headed horizontal, crossing a vertical". In other words:
This one's fairly straightforward, and it's easy to imagine encoding it in some convenient way…
Draconis
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Is Mississippi cognate with Michigan?
I was reading about the etymology of the word Michigan. It said that it came from an Ojibwe word meaning "big water". And then, I saw that Mississippi was from another Ojibwe word meaning "father of water". I have come to believe these states are…
Mitten File
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Why do the same phonological changes happen in multiple unrelated languages?
For example, a lot of languages have a historical [y] sound which eventually merged with [i] in different language families. This happened in Greek, Vulgar Latin, Icelandic and Faroese as well as Czech and Slovak. However, they do not belong to the…
Michael Tsang
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Do voiceless approximants exist? What is the consensus among phoneticians/phonologists?
Voiceless sounds that are produced with supralaryngeal configurations that would be considered approximants if voiced are attested in languages (i.e. [j̊], [l̥], etc.), but none are found to contrast with homorganic fricatives ([ç], [ɬ],…
Nardog
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Pronoun introduced before its antecedent
I was speaking to a college-educated American woman in her 80s, born and raised in the metropolitan east coast of the United States.
We were on a new topic, and without any preceding context, she said:
Her accountant told Janet that she really…
SlowMagic
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Non-African Click Languages
Paralinguistic clicks are quite common across world's languages. But paralinguistic clicks usually appears as ideophones. But why is Africa the only continent that uses click consonants? Are there any theories/speculation/hypotheses for why click…
Rock
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Is there any other language containing the sound of the "evanescent l" in Venetian?
Venetian (the Italo-Romance language spoken in the area of Italy roughly corresponding to the Veneto region) has a weird sound which is usually called l evanescente (evanescent l). It varies geographically (from a completely normal /l/ to mute), but…
Denis Nardin
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12
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3 answers
Does writing influence grammar?
Do we know of any cases where the grammar of a language was influenced by the imperfection of its writing system? For example, has any language become isolating because it had a logographic writing, which didn't express inflections?
Lev
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Are there any languages that only allow CV syllables?
In my research online, I have found a truism that CV is the most basic syllable type cross-linguistically, and is in fact present in all languages. Other syllable types are not present in all languages. This raises the question: is there any…
DLosc
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Using the word "dream" as hope for the future across languages
Many languages seem to use the same word for "dream" (psychological phenomenon) and "dream" (hope for the future). Quick scanning on Wiktionary gives the list:
Germanic languages: Danish (drøm), Dutch (droom), English (dream), German (Traum),…
puzzlet
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Can the "dialect continuum" phenomenon be recognized from Rome to Lisbon?
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a spread of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighbouring varieties differ only slightly, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties are…
Centaurus
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Why are some linguists and other people very much against conlangs?
There are linguists that are very much against conlanging, here are two commonly claimed reasons:
It's not science.
It wastes manpower, time and energy that should have been used to
rescue an already existing rare natural language or do field…
kaleissin
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IPA transcription of the American English "bunched" /r/
There are 2 common articulations of /r/ and /r̩/ in American English, one retroflex, and the other dorsal. This phone is called the molar or bunched r. It can be described roughly as a back-palatal or pre-velar approximant that's somewhat bunched up…
Mechanical snail
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12
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Is there free and open Chinese corpus?
The corpus in NLTK sinica can be used for research.
There are two shortcomings for sinica to be used in research.
too small
it is a traditional Chinese corpus
Can someone here introduce a big and simplified Chinese corpus that can be freely…
showkey
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Do atonal languages have a tonal ancestor?
One of the distinctions among languages is the tonal/atonal distinction. Dediu & Ladd (2007) suggest that this split between tonal and atonal languages is related to a recent mutation in the ASPM gene. In particular, people with the newer variant of…
Artem Kaznatcheev
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