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Is anything known about the origin of the hard "g" in "guénti" in Santiago, Cape Verdean Creole?

There is a word "guénti" /'gɛn ti/ in the Santiago dialect of Cape Verdean Creole, which is used to mean "people" or "you people/you all". It clearly comes from the Portuguese word "gente", which has about the same meaning, as most words in Cape…
Dan Getz
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Is mouthing phonemic in American Sign Language or other sign languages?

To be precise about my question: are there any pairs of signs in ASL or other sign languages where mouthing different words is the only thing which distinguishes two signs from one another? I’m asking primarily about ASL, but if there are other sign…
Breaking Bioinformatics
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Is there a reason that /w/ isn't represented on the IPA chart?

The sound that represents the English , as in "week", is the voiced labio-velar approximant /w/. In the "Consonant" section of the Wiki page for the IPA, however, /w/ isn't listed, and there's no section for "labio-velar". In the "Consonant"…
Lou
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What is the correct term for a "lazy L"?

This question is about a mild form of a specific speech pathology that seems to be gaining prevalence in Australia and if there is a term for it. It is not an "accent" issue, because it can be found in many flavours of Australian accents. I called…
Bohemian
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Is it accurate - Chinese Wikipedia on Japanese/Korean classification

I'm not very updated on random theories regarding the Altaic theory (which I personally am agnostic about; though I slant towards not believing in it due to the extreme lack of any regular sound change patterns from "Proto-Altaic") and the…
ithisa
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Are there any languages with only front vowels?

I'm curious why every language I've heard of has back or central vowels. Are there any languages that exclusively uses front vowels (say the phonemes /a/, /e/, /i/, /y/)? I want to know this more or less because I'm making a simple conlang that I…
ithisa
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Why can you say "I am not sure whether it's raining" but not "I am sure whether it's raining"?

I know that some verbs take interrogative clauses ("I know where they are") while others don't (* "I believe where they are"). The verb "sure" is kind of like "believe", but unlike "believe" it seems to allow interrogatives under some circumstances,…
eyet
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Non-Projective Example

I'm looking for an example sentence with a non-projective dependency parse. It doesn't have to be in English, though such an example would be nice.
Omer
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Why are the orthographies of Ancient/Proto Languages so Impractical?

For example: In the Romanization of Sumerian, /ŋ/ is written as ⟨g̃⟩ or ⟨ĝ⟩ instead of ⟨ng⟩ or even ⟨ŋ⟩. Also in Sumerian /t͡sʰ/ is written ⟨ř⟩ or ⟨dr⟩. The list goes on with Sumerian. In Proto-Indo-European (Which I know is technically not a real…
user8796978
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Does knowing PIE roots help with vocab?

It is known that in theory (and in practice, but you need dedication in practice) learning Latin can help with vocabulary in English. (I know Spanish, it helped me with vocab words, and I'm learning more so I can talk to my family in their first…
Number File
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Etymology (?) of the "shush" gesture

I'm curious about the origin of and explanation for the place-index-finger-to-closed-lips gesture. All I've found so far is this unattributed assertion that it dates at least to the era of Classical Rome. For instance, consider two gestures of…
Paul Tanenbaum
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Are all "Ergative Languages" split-ergative?

I've noticed that in a lot of examples of "ergative languages," there is some piece of the language that does not fit the pattern we call "ergativity." For example, Basque does not mark ergative case in the progressive aspect, and Dyirbal pronouns…
matan-matika
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How to determine which phoneme a group of allophones realizes?

This question is related to this other one, about the difference between Phonetics and Phonology. I can understand the difference between the two subfields as well as what it means to produce phonetic and phonologic transcriptions. Simply stated,…
Otavio Macedo
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Positive & Negative Polarity Items, and Interrogatives

There are certain items in some languages that tend to occur largely in negative clauses. In English, one such item might be the word ever: *I have ever been to Paris. I haven't ever been to Paris. There are other items that tend to only occur in…
Araucaria - him
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Why do adjectives come before nouns in English?

Why does the attributive adjective come before a noun in English? In most languages, the adjective comes always after a noun. For example, white car is written as the equivalent of car white in Latin languages. What is the origin of this?
Liligirl
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