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Why IPA does not indicate "soft" consonants in English?
I am a native Russian speaker. Sometimes I encounter English speakers who are trying to learn Russian and wonder how to pronounce "soft" consonants.
At the same time while learning English I noticed that definitely not all consonants are pronounced…
Anixx
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Why can "autarchy" be spelled with an "k" while other words not?
English has a set of words with "ch", coming — more or less directly — from the Greek language. They all have a /k/ sound.
character
charisma
psychology
choreography
archive
Just to name a few. All these words are spelled with "ch" — no matter the…
Em1
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Is use of sorting expected and used in East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)?
For an English speaker with 26 characters, the concept of sorting is ubiquitous. If I see a list, I inherently expect it to be sorted by one of the columns, and of course clicking a column to sort is useful to me if that column's value is what I…
Oliver Williams
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What are the origins of the word Hebrew?
I have read that this word may derive from an Egyptian decree issued by Pharoah Merueptah (1224 which referred to the hebrew word 'habitu' (type of slave) who carry stones for the great pylon of the great city of Rameses'.
But what is the actual…
user1738
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Is there any language with number system that uses subtraction? (Other than Ainu)
Generally all number systems use addition or multiplication to express numbers like - '12*3 + 6 for 42 in a base 12 system', '2 on the way to 50' or 'even 10+10+10+10+2 in some'. But, are there number systems which use subtraction like 10*5-8 (for…
WiccanKarnak
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Old Chinese romanization using a letter that looks like a "3"
I know something about both Chinese and philology, but not much, so please explain like I'm 20. :)
I'm looking at a text on Wikisource dealing with "the Shû King". It refers to "Mo-3ze" (Mo-zi) and "Hsün-3ze" (Xun-zi), and someone called "3o…
Quuxplusone
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Do we have the scientific theory why the click consonants were developed?
Do we have a scientific theory explaining why the click consonants were developed, and why they are used almost exclusivly in praerie regions?
I've watched a BBC documentary about the evolution of humans, and the speaker noticed when hunting with…
Stepan Vihor
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Earliest recognition that Germanic and Romance languages are related
A recent question here, Earliest recognition that Romance languages are related asks for when in history it was first noted that individual Romance languages were recognized as ... similar/related/coming from Latin/etc.
As has been answered there,…
Mitch
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What is the definition of "rare language"?
The term "rare languages" is sometimes used in newspaper headings, blog posts, etc. For example:
This Innovative Platform Ensures That Kids in India Have Access to Stories in Their Mother Tongue, The Better India, 26 Jul 2016 (examples: Sanskrit,…
Tsundoku
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How did the pitch-accent system of Western South Slavic emerge?
Uniquely among Slavic languages, and unusually among modern Indo-European languages, the Western South Slavic languages (Serbo-Croatian, and apparently some dialects of Slovenian) have a lexical pitch-accent system. That is, the languages permit…
Mechanical snail
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What is the essence of the dispute between Wolfe and Chomsky?
I read the report in Sunday's Observer concerning the dispute between Tom Wolfe (author Kingdom of Speech) and Noam Chomsky (professor emeritus Massachusetts Institute of Technology) over their divergent views on the origins of human speech.
Whilst…
WS2
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What has the study of second language acquisition brought to foreign language teachers?
Learning a second language, either by immersing yourself into the culture that speaks it or by being formally taught by a fluent speaker, is an old practice in history. But the scientific study of second language acquisition is a much more recent…
Otavio Macedo
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French Numbering System - Eighty to Ninety-Nine
Why does French use the format "4 x 20 + n" (n = 0 to 19) for numbers from eighty to ninety-nine?
MediumOne
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Do languages ever get new cases?
In my education, I've learned about a lot of languages whose case systems have atrophied, especially from PIE.
Wikipedia had a reference to The Evolution of Case Systems for Marking Event Structure, but that was focused on language games (abstract…
Azor Ahai -him-
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Is there anything analogous to grammatical gender for verbs?
Grammatical gender often seems arbitrary from a semantic point of view. When I was taking French many years ago, we were told that one must simply memorize the gender for each noun. Are there any languages with similar markings on the…
James Grossmann
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