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Feminisation of men's language?
I was wondering whether there has been (generally) a feminisation of "men's language". Lakoff's claims in "women's and men's language" are almost half a century old and there have been contradictory and confirming studies (for sure context,…
blackcurrant
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Why do Korean and Japanese sound similar to each other to native speakers of English?
I don't understand why, but Korean and Japanese sound very similar to me, and also to other native speakers of English. I think I once read a comment saying something like "If it sounds like Japanese but you can't understand what is being said, then…
Golden Cuy
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What is the role of syntax in understanding event descriptive sentences?
I've been closely following the work stemming from St. John and McClelland's Sentence Gestalt Model, which uses a connectist model to extract semantic information about events from sentences without first specifying the syntactic structure.
I've…
zergylord
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Languages preserving loanword inflections
Erudite English has an interesting practice where the plural form of loanwords may follow the inflectional grammar of the source language. Thus "campi" as well as "campuses", "minima" as well as "minimums", "these kanji were" as well as "these…
melissa_boiko
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Is there a term for when words that sound like antonyms are actually synonyms?
Seeded grapes are actually seedless
An inflammable object is really flammable
It seems to me that, superficially, the use of those affixes make the words sound like they should be antonyms, but they are not. Is this an actual thing, or just a…
Andy
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Declinable conjunctions
Duolingo states: “In German, conjunctions do not change with the case (i.e. they are not declinable).”1 I started to think of languages I know, and I don't remember any which would have this property.
So, are there languages where conjunctions are…
liori
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Is there a language with but one vowel sound?
Is there a language known to have no minimal pairs separating vowels, or in which only one vowel exists phonemically in the language, or whose speakers don't detect a difference between any two vowels when they appear in words in the language? (My…
msh210
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Italian passato prossimo agrees with subject with 'essere' but not 'avere'. Why?
Another question about Italian grammar aside from this one which has bugged me for ages.
In Italian, when forming the passato prossimo with an intransitive verb, we use forms of the auxiliary verb avere; with transitive verbs, essere is used…
jogloran
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Are there languages where adjectives are clearly neither noun-like nor verb-like?
Most language I have some knowledge of have adjectives with are either a) nominal in nature or b) verbal in nature. (apologies if this is not the best wording.)
In German, Romanian, and Georgian, adjectives decline for noun properties such as…
hippietrail
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Are there any languages with the equivalent of "both" for three items?
Referring to this question it seems that English does not have the equivalent of "both" for three items. Although it would seem to be a useful word, I am unaware of its existence in any languages. Is there any language that has such a word?
user2398029
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Is there a strong case for the existence of languages that lack a clear morpho-syntactic distinction between nouns and verbs?
Is there a strong case for the existence of languages that lack a clear morpho-syntactic distinction between nouns and verbs? If so, what would be an example of a phrase structure for a uniclausal simple transitive sentence in such a language? …
James Grossmann
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How useful is the "pimsleur approach" for learning a new language?
I saw this video earlier today (The most important part is from 8.00 to 9.00), explaining what the "Pimsleur approach" is. It got me interested, because they claim it's the fastest method of learning the basics of a new language. Has there ever been…
Simon Verbeke
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When did the Celtic languages die out in Spain?
I'm writing something about the Celtic languages of northwestern Europe when the Saxons came to Britain, and described a "continuous but loose-knit group of peoples in France and the British isles". A colleague reminds me of the Celtic peoples of…
RLG
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Do sign languages have "accents" like verbal languages?
Do sign languages have "accents" like verbal languages? If so, what would be some examples of those?
Luís Henrique
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Why exactly is *“I Am America (And So Can You!)” ungrammatical?
Stephen Colbert wrote a book entitled “I Am America (And So Can You!)”. As discussed in a question on English Language and Usage, the title is an intentionally strange way of saying "I am America, and you can [be America] too", as a parody of…
Mechanical snail
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