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Does English "day" really come from PIE *dʰegʷʰ- (“to burn”)?
day
From Middle English day, from Old English dæġ (“day”), from Proto-West Germanic *dag, from Proto-Germanic *dagaz (“day”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰogʷʰ-o-s, from *dʰegʷʰ- (“to burn”).
Cognate with Saterland Frisian Dai (“day”), West Frisian…
archenoo
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What statistical methods are used to test whether a corpus of symbols is linguistic?
In their 2009 paper on the Indus Script, Rao et al. describe a test for deciding whether a corpus of symbols is in fact a collection of texts in some language. Over-simplifying a bit, the approach they follow can be summarized as follows. They begin…
Azo
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Simultaneity in natural languages?
Is there any known natural language in which it is possible to express grammatically—i.e., not through emotional tone or other secondary traits—multiple parallel channels of meaning? Parallel structures could be made explicit in such a language by…
Jon Purdy
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Linguistic research on translation evaluation
I have a background in natural language processing and machine translation, and recently I've been interested in automatic evaluation of translations.
I've read a lot of literature from the machine translation world on approaches to evaluation. Most…
Sara
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Has a spoken language ever borrowed a word from a signed language?
There are plenty of examples of signed languages borrowing or deriving words from spoken language. In ASL, the word DOG is a lexicalized fingerspelling of "dog", CHURCH is made with the "c" handshape corresponding to the first letter of "church",…
Peter Olson
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What linguistic evidence is there in support of/in opposition to the account of the Tower of Babel?
I do not intend for this question to incite a debate as to the historicity/validity of the account of the Tower of Babel, I am simply interested in seeing how it fits into the framework of modern linguistic understanding.
The account suggests that…
PrimeNumbers
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Why are letters with a stroke not decomposed in Unicode?
There's a strait which is called Øresund in Danish and Öresund in Swedish.
Looking at Latin Capital Letter O with Stroke, it has no decomposition rules.
Looking at Latin Capital Letter O with Diaeresis, it decomposes into Latin Capital Letter O and…
chx
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Are linguistic corpora under threat from AI-generated text?
As many will be aware, there has been a lot of concern about the spread of AI generated text posted on the Stack Exchange network, leading to moderators on several sites standing down. See here and also here.
My question is not about the spread of…
Araucaria - him
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How close are the Italian and the Romanian open central unrounded vowels?
The "a" sound in Italian and Romanian, is identified as the central unrounded vowel and represented as being practically identical, very close to [ä].
Although a is used in these images to indicate [ä].
(Complete IPA chart with sound here.)
But,…
cipricus
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How did the generic masculine emerge?
In an essay for school I recently claimed the generic masculine was caused by sexism, but my teacher complained that I hadn't given a reason for this. Assuming my hypothesis is correct, how did this develop (I'm not asking about a gender system or…
zvavybir
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What is the evidence of the typological cycle theory?
There is a theory that languages move from one morphological typology (isolating, inflected, agglutinating) to the next in a usual, predictable cycle.
What evidence is proposed to support this theory?
As background, I am also familiar with natural…
Louis Rhys
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Why are modal verbs in English defective?
Modal verbs exist in many languages; but they are often defective. English is an extreme example where they seem to only have present tense forms; and have no gerund, participle, or infinitive; some also lack a past tense. I was wondering how does…
noah johnson
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Origin of *-k- "extension" in (aorist of) some IE verbs?
In Greek, the PIE verbal roots *dheh1 'put' or 'do', *Hieh1 'throw', and *deh3 'give' show up with an unexpected -k- in some aorist forms: ἔθηκα, ἧκα, ἔδωκα. In Latin, the reflexes of the first two roots have -k- throughout: facio, iacio (although…
TKR
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Why /əl/ in English sounds like [o]?
I am not a native English speaker. Recently i study some phonetics to improve my english pronunciation (and also french which i am currently studying). I noticed many words with phoneme /əl/ sound like [o] to my ears, like "peoPlE" or "canCEL". I…
Minh123
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Do the Belarusians understand the Ukrainian language better than Russians do?
Here is an interview on a opposition Belarussian TV channel with an Ukrainian officer. One host is speaking Russian, the other speaks Belarussian and the guest speaks Ukrainian.
There is no translation, so I think…
Anixx
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