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Why is Greek alphabet left-to-right?
The Greek alphabet and all of its child systems such as Roman, Cyrillic, and Gothic are conventionally left-to-right writting systems. But why is that, considering it comes from the Phoenician alphabet, which is a right-to-left system?
Normally, you…
user22430
11
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Are /tl/ and /dl/ rare onsets worldwide?
Onsets of stop+liquid are very common, but it seems like /tl/ and /dl/ are much rarer than other stop+liquid onsets, like /gl/ or /pr/.
Are /tl/ and /dl/ especially rare compared to other stop+liquid onsets?
(I wouldn't be surprised at all to find…
Joe
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Correlation between politeness of a culture and its languages
In the question Is there any reason why English doesn’t add respectful words in every sentence? that was asking why there's more respectful language in Korean and Japanese compared to English, the accepted answer was
The primary reason is cultural.…
Golden Cuy
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11
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Do any languages have verbal inflection with a plural object?
The verb in a language like English can inflect for person, for example:
I see the cat > he sees the cat
and the verb can inflect for tense:
I see the cat > I saw the cat
But do any languages inflect for the singular/plural aspect of the…
Danger Fourpence
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11
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Meaning of sufformative versus suffix
In reading Daniel Block's commentary on Ezekiel, I have come across the word sufformative. (Block uses it of the Hebrew masculine singular ending -em.) I have searched all around but cannot find a definition. Searching on Google is instructive in…
Kazark
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11
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Is there a biological reason to vowel shift?
Trying to explain vowel shift in French I wrote on FL&U that "Vowel sounds are more prone to evolution than consonants. I suppose it is because phonatory organs are not as easily controlled when sounding vowels than when sounding consonants". Could…
None
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11
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Why is Hangul (Korean script) not considered an Abugida
An abugida is a script where consonant and vowels form a unit of some form, and are typical in South Asia.
Now, the Korean script isn't related to those languages, of course. But the Korean script is also formed of characters which have parts…
hgiesel
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11
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Where did the use of the two auxiliaries in the Romance languages come from?
Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French all have a (compound) perfect tense, which I find curious, given that Latin did not. (You can alternatively perhaps say that it is either united with the perfect and preterite/aorist tenses, rather than it…
Noldorin
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The power of trigram language models (2nd order Markov models)
Many people in computational linguistics seem to mention the unexpected power of trigram (or 2nd order Markov) models for language modeling. For instance, it has been stated (verbally) to me on several occasions that trigram models outperform…
Julie
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Why did Greek never develop into other languages like Latin?
The Hellenization of the classical world is one of the biggest events in ancient history, similar to the conquests of Rome in later centuries. Greek rulers held Egypt, Mesopotamia, Turkey, even places as far as Afghanistan and Delhi. This trend…
DeLissaplitz Anonymous
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11
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Languages where articles occur to the right of nouns
Are there languages where articles appear—as independent words—on the right-hand side of the noun phrases they occur in - in other words after the head noun in the noun phrase?
Araucaria - him
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How does the initial consonant in "Jupiter" and "Zeus" come from the "d" in PIE "*dyew-"?
Jupiter, is from Proto-Indo-European *dyew- (“sky”) (whence also Latin diēs).
Cognate with Ancient Greek Ζεύς (Zeus), Hittite (sius), Sanskrit द्यु (dyú). The nominative Iuppiter comes from a vocative combined with Proto-Indo-European *ph₂tḗr…
archenoo
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What languages are the most similar to English?
I speak English and Bengali with similar proficiency, at least in the 'lower' registers of the languages. Since I was a small child in a bilingual home I've been struck by how, despite having different vocabularies, the two languages seemed very…
immutabl
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Diachronic devoicing of initial lenis plosives in English
I get the impression that in the "classical Received Pronunciation" of English during phonetician Jones's era, the lenis plosives /b/, /d/, /g/ (and probably the affricate /dʒ/ as well) in initial position were more voiced than the English of…
Michaelyus
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To which degree are Western and Eastern Armenian mutually intelligible?
From what I see at this wiki page, these two versions of Armenian show differences in phonology and sometimes in grammar which are greater than, say, a difference between Russian and Polish (and quite close to that between Finnish and Estonian).
So,…
Manjusri
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