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Unaugmented contract imperfect in Ancient Greek?
Since unaugmented forms are ancient verbal forms (found by example in Homer), older than the augmented ones, and since vowels contraction is still a "work in progress" at homeric times and will be generalized later, I would like to know if…
suizokukan
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Are there some analyses or linguists with the view that Chinese does not have lexical word class?
I'm not a linguist but a language enthusiast and I read lots of stuff about all languages mostly on the internet in blogs but also in accessible books and sometimes attempt to read some things not aimed at a general audience.
I'm sure I've read…
hippietrail
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Online etymology dictionary for Latin
Is there an etymology dictionary for Latin that is available on the Internet? For example, I know of http://etymonline.com/, which is a great resource for English etymology, but I have not been able to find an equivalent site for Latin.
So if…
sashoalm
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Why is Mikołaj the Polish reflex of Nicholas?
The Polish name Mikołaj is held to correspond to the Nicholas family of given names, as evidenced by the Russified name of Mikołaj Kruszewski.
As this is an odd sound change, my question is why? My first guess would be interference from Michał and…
jogloran
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Is دشمن ("enemy" in Persian) borrowed from δυσμενής ("hostile" in ancient Greek)?
A couple of years ago I encountered the world δυσμενής, meaning hostile, in an ancient Greek text I translated. If I recall correctly, this can be pronounced as "dusmenè". This always intrigued me, because being a speaker of Dari (which is a dialect…
OmnipresentAbsence
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What's the difference between counterbleeding, bleeding and feeding?
Bleeding is when rule A prevents rule B from applying. But counterbleeding is when two rules are ordered too late to bleed. I see counterbleeding the same as feeding.
Let's say you have some segment X. Rule A and B may only apply to X. A applies…
RECURSIVE FARTS
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What motivates / allows preposition stranding in English, but disallows it in other languages, like Mandarin?
If someone could direct me to papers/sites that describe this, and a summary or something, that would be great.
It is just a parameter for languages? What do linguists think so far?
Example:
"Which store did you buy the book from?" and "From which…
dmonopoly
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What are the other types of grammatical numbers different from those determined by 'quantity of items'?
Different languages have different grammatical numbers. For most IE languages, these are Singular, Plural and, sometimes, Dual.
Other languages have grammatical numbers differentiated by the quantity of 'items' (from Dual to Trial, e.g. in Bislama,…
Manjusri
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Discontinuous morphemes in Indo-European languages
Indo-European is not a language family known for discontinuous morphology, but there are occasional examples. I can think of two:
The German and Dutch past participle formants, ge-en and ge-t, e.g. Dutch ge-nom-en, ge-werk-t.
The Ancient Greek…
TKR
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What's the difference between recursion and embedding?
Chains of relative clauses and strings of attributive adjectives are both examples of recursion--Correct?
Chains of relative clauses have each non-initial relative clause embedded within the previous one:
[the cat [that killed the bird [that ate…
James Grossmann
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Why is the definite article in Balkan languages always called a suffix when it really seems to be part of the inflection?
The Scandinavian languages have a suffix definite article which is pretty straightforwardly tacked on to to the ends of nouns: -en, -et.
But in languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, Romanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Albanian it is not so…
hippietrail
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How can a speaker tell whether their idiolect has "dark l"?
I believe my variety of English, General Australian, has "dark l", but I'm not sure.
I can't tell if I have it in my own idiolect or not.
It's pretty well accepted (I think) that it's hard to linguistically analyse your own speech.
In this case it…
hippietrail
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In which situations or societies do people not take turns to speak in conversations?
When reading the chapter about discourse analysis in George Yule's The Study of Language, I came across the following statement about conversation:
Typically, only one person speaks at a time and there tends to be an avoidance of silence between…
Sophiefy
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Are there purely isolating/analytic languages with grammatical gender?
It seems that all the things which reflect grammatical gender in languages have to do with inflectional (presumably also agglutinative) morphology, such as agreement.
But is that just coincidence, it seems the same kind of thing could be reflected…
hippietrail
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Is there a list of word meanings that are universally represented in all languages?
I am looking for a comprehensive list of words/concepts that are represented in most if not all known languages - presumably the category would include human body parts (hand, foot, mouth, eye), things present in the environment (sun, sky, cloud,…
norlesh
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