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1500 questions
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Languages with subordinate imperatives?
English does not allow an imperative to be used in a subordinate clause:
Eat that pizza!
*There's a pizza on the table, which eat! (="which I order you to eat")
*I told you eat that pizza!
(A superficially similar variant of 3 is grammatical: "I…
TKR
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Languages with stricter and less strict word order?
I'm sure most people here know, but for completeness, let's define what syntax is:
The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language. [NOAD]
N.B. It can also refer to the rules that govern it, or to the linguistics…
Alenanno
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Are there creoles of three languages?
Are there examples of creole languages that have had three or more other languages as parents without intermediate two-language creoles? If they exist, then how high is the 'or more', i.e. what is the largest n such that a direct n-language creole…
Artem Kaznatcheev
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Does Mandarin Chinese have phonetically voiced plosives, fricatives, or affricates (besides "r" = [ʐ] / [ɻ])?
The various Wikipedia articles covering Standard Chinese all seem to agree that Mandarin does not have voiced plosives, fricatives, or affricates except for [ʐ] / [ɻ], written in Pinyin as "r".
But many other sources cite voiced IPA symbols and when…
hippietrail
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How can unrelated language families exist after the evolution of language?
What I mean is this: Archeologically and genetically speaking, most indigenous peoples of North and South America (namely, all but the ones descending from those who brought the Na-Dené and Eskimo-Aleut languages) descend from a single population…
Cecilia
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Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?
An answer to a different question pointed out that the vast majority of search engine queries coming from Ukraine, before the invasion, seemed to be in Russian. That was despite the fact that the queries shown seemed to be asking for local…
MWB
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Why did Japanese borrow words for simple numbers from Chinese?
I just realised that all (standalone) Japanese numbers from 1-10 are borrowed from Chinese (maybe except 4 and 7 if they're read as よん and なな instead of し and しち). Now, I understand why a language would want to borrow words for really large numbers…
HypnoSkales
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11
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Stable words in the Indo-European language family
(I am not a linguist, so I don't know proper terminology)
When studying Spanish and French, I quickly learned that many very common verbs have irregular forms; the reason given was that common usage gave way to more possibilities for the word to…
Arcanus
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Are tones "preserved" when borrowing between unrelated tonal languages?
Let's consider just borrowing between unrelated, national/standardized tonal languages, just in case borrowing between related languages might be a special case and borrowing between non standardized languages might be more variable:
Cantonese ↔…
hippietrail
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What do you call it when you write the next word in a sequence twice instead of the current and next word?
I'm not sure how to phrase it, but I'll give an example.
Let's say I want to type "Think this will be the last instruction?"
While typing this out, I recite the phrase in my head, but I type the following:
"this this will be the last…
Matthew Polak
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7 answers
11
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3 answers
Why are affix hopping and head movement considered as distinct operations?
Affix hopping is a morphological operation by which an unattached affix in the T position is lowered onto a verb. This attachment is done by the "Phonetic Form component" (the posited component in the mind that transforms the inputs it receives from…
Otavio Macedo
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Which language is more complex, English or French? Is it even possible to objectively measure a language's complexity?
OK, so I'm a native English speaker who learned French as a teenager and I have a friend who is French and learned English as a teenager (so the opposite).
The other day he was telling me how easy English is (in broken English) and how it's so much…
Franglishman24
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Simultaneous bilingualism vs Sequential bilingualism
Simultaneous bilingualism (or multilangualism) is when a child acquires two (or many) languages simultaneously, for example when they are raised by parents speaking more than one language.
Sequential is when the child acquires the second…
Louis Rhys
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11
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What is the difference between /ʎ/ and /l̠ʲ/?
As far as I can find the descriptions it appears that they're the same. Why would 2 different IPA characters used then?
keke
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