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Can you give some examples of counter-intuitive phenomena discovered by linguists?

By counter-intuitive I mean, contrary to intuition of native speakers of some language, or contrary to some popular knowledge about languages (apart many cases of folk etymology)? (e. g. "strange" language family; rain in Chinese it's not…
compendiumsprachez
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Is it possible to change your mother-tongue by thinking in another language?

Once I heard from someone that your mother tongue is the language you talk in your thoughts. I've asked many people to verify the correctness of this proposition and to me, inductively this seems to be true. However, I can't deductively claim it,…
Saeed Neamati
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Are there any recent articles on the current state of Case theory?

Specifically I'm interested in the split between Structural Case and Morphological case. Structural Case has been part of Chomskyan syntactic theory since at least Government & Binding (GB). Roughly, Case Theory in GB and the minimalist program…
Dan Milway
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Where can I learn more about the 'linguistic center of gravity' theory?

"The linguistic center of gravity principle states that a language family's most likely point of origin is in the area of its greatest diversity." (Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_India_theory) Can you direct me to further…
Sandra Buskey
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What are the different ways in which languages express the notion of passivity?

In English, the passive is expressed by the use of an auxiliary and past participle. The agent is demoted to an optional by-phrase, and the theme/patient is promoted to the subject position. Rome destroyed Carthage –––> Carthage was destroyed (by…
user325
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Are there any statistics or web services for n-grams of frequent English words?

I found this for six common subjects. But it doesn't contain the complete statistics about all common English words.
ARZ
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Is the German "conjunctive" the same as the "subjunctive" of other languages? If so why the different name?

Many languages have a subjunctive mood but German has a conjunctive. However is the German conjunctive just a different name for the same mood? If the two are different what is the difference? If not why the different name? I've had conversations…
hippietrail
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Help me find an early Old Norse dictionary (or even a grammar)

For some time I've been looking for a dictionary of Old Norse that reflects an early situation in the language; this kind of resource has been amazingly hard to find, for some reason. Most dictionaries I find reflect a bit of a later stage than what…
Darkgamma
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Are there writing systems with more than upper case and lower case?

The English alphabet has two "cases", UPPER CASE and lower case. Japanese hiragana has one case. Are there any writing systems, with, say, 3, 4 or more cases?
Jane Nguyen
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Did Uralic borrow basic vocabulary from PIE, and if so why?

This section of the Wikipedia article on laryngeal theory lists proposed IE-to-Uralic loanwords containing laryngeals. Several of these have quite basic meanings: "woman", "person", "do", "give", "go". Though not unheard of, it's unusual for…
TKR
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Is Language infinite?

Can a Natural Language (like English for instance) describe anything? Are our thoughts limited by our language? If the number of words in a Natural Language is a finite set, can this set describe an infinite number of concepts, notions or ideas? Is…
Haider Atrah
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Where can I find a reliable academic source of translations of words to the world's languages?

In this recent question, I was trying to research a list of translation for "no", and a quick google found this page. That website also has other similar pages, like translation of "Hello", "Good morning", etc. However, I am not sure about the…
Louis Rhys
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Correct syllabification in (American) English

I need to figure out what the proper syllabification of words in American English is and why. PLEASE NOTE: I am interested in syllabification from a phonetic point of view, not in terms of hyphenation/spelling. Dictionary.com (Random House) and…
Fabien Snauwaert
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Corpus of Chat/IM/Text Conversations?

I was wondering if there is any conversational corpus available to the public. The ideal corpus would be one made up of AIM messages with users tagged and lots of different users. I would imagine something like this might not be available and…
clifgray
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How old is linguistics as a discipline?

I hear a lot of people talk about how "new" linguistics is, or how "small" it is compared to other fields. Pāṇini studied grammar in the 4th century BC. Surely it didn't take until recent history to study it scientifically?
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