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Does lexeme and stem mean the same?
Wikipedia says following about lexeme:
A lexeme is a unit of lexical meaning... For example, in English, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, which can be represented as
Wikipedia says following about stem:
In linguistics, a…
Rnj
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Is there a collective term for the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets?
I was just wondering if such a term exists, since they are very similar to each other, and all of them derive from the Greek alphabet, so I thought perhaps there might be a collective term for the three of them.
Quintus Caesius - RM
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Why is it called proto-Germanic?
Why have we named this proto language proto-Germanic?
Apparently it developed in southern Scandinavia. Then expanded (via migration or contact?) towards what's now Germany.
I wonder why linguists chose to name it "proto-Germanic", instead of any…
minseong
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Do any languages form plural pronouns by adding a suffix to the singular form?
Are there languages whose plural pronouns ('we', 'they', etc.) are formed from singular pronouns ('I', 'he', etc.) plus a plural marker?
For example, if English were such a language, instead of "we" we would say "Is" (the pronoun 'I' + the plural…
kodkod
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Is the rate of vocabulary change more or less constant?
Has the rate of vocabulary change (that is, number of words falling out of use per decade, say) been found to be largely constant in human societies or does it strongly depend on circumstances?
If writing happens to be a major factor, has this rate…
Phira
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Where did Latin and its descendants retain a case system most recently?
So we know that Latin nouns and adjectives inflect for case as well as person, number, and gender.
Also we know that all the major modern Romance languages except Romanian no longer have a case system.
I believe it's been judged that Romanian's case…
hippietrail
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Is the concept of 'long vowel' still relevant in modern English phonology?
It seems to me that despite the fact that Middle English long vowels have long since shifted dramatically, their descendants still pattern like long vowels in modern English. Since there's really very few cases where some kind of diagnostic…
Sjiveru
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Is there a named common ancestor of Germanic and Latin besides "Indo-European"?
I was just answering a question about the origins of English and Latin and wanted to talk about their common ancestors but ran into a surprising problem.
So we know the majority of languages in Europe and the Indian subcontinent are related under…
hippietrail
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Days of the week in Yiddish -- why so similar to Germanic?
I note that Saturday is Shabbes but the other days are similar to German which are based on Norse mythology -- one could easily see this being a problem and that a choice to use the Hebrew words for the days have been made. Is it possible that…
releseabe
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What is the origin of certain Hungarian suffixes?
I have a question about the etymology (within the Uralic family) of three Hungarian morphemes
Accusative -t- suffix: Hungarian has an accusative in -t- (eg. fiú, fiút), which has no cognates in any of the Uralic languages that I am aware of, which…
user8606
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Is the sound "ř" unique to Czech?
Czech has special sound which to me seems to be a voiced trilled r. It is written as "ř".
Wikipedia describes it a different way: A raised alveolar trill, and uses the IPA notation [r̝].
Czech speakers always seem to tell me that it's unique and…
hippietrail
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Can or has the comparative method be used in current Arabic dialects to reconstruct Classical Arabic?
The comparative method has been used in modern Romance languages to piece together Vulgar Latin and Proto Romance. Has the same been done for the modern Arabic dialects to recreate the last descendant of pan-Arabic?
As a side question, do Arab…
LS_115
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Is Riau Indonesian really monocategorial?
There have been plenty of publications (mostly by David Gil) discussing how Riau Indonesian is a unique language that lacks word categories.
To me, this sounds huge: a truly unique language, no word classes, limits of languages broadened. I'm no…
A.V. Arno
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Is the Sanskrit spoken natively in pockets in India changing?
There are some small pockets in India where people actually speak Sanskrit as a native language. From Wikipedia:
In these Indian villages, inhabitants of all castes speak Sanskrit natively since childhood:
Mattur in Karnataka
Jhiri, District:…
hippietrail
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Is there a general consensus on what modern language is the closest relative of Albanian?
I'm off to Albania tomorrow so starting to get more and more interested in the language.
It's one of the outliers on the Indo-European family tree. It's not hard to see a relationship but it's not easy to say what that relationship is.
As well as…
hippietrail
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