Linguistics Stack Exchange
Linguistics Stack Exchange

Most Popular

more tags
1500 questions
9
votes
6 answers

Is there a voiced-unvoiced pair for R or L in any language?

Voiced and unvoiced consonant pairs exist for /z/ and /s/, /g/ and /k/, /b/ and /p/, and many others. But I've never heard it for /ɹ/ or /l/. I think it's totally possible to use the vocal cords for those consonants, as well as not using the vocal…
DrZ214
  • 193
  • 1
  • 6
9
votes
1 answer

Is there really a perfect tense?

I went through my entire English and French educations learning nothing about aspect. We only learned about tenses and a little bit about mood. With that K12* vocabulary, we'd call J'avais mangé l'orange and I had eaten the orange the…
Merchako
  • 231
  • 1
  • 6
9
votes
1 answer

What is a half-transitivizer?

I've been learning Greenlandic and I came across this term, and I can't find anything about it online. Can anyone explain it in Layman's terms?
Qenglow
  • 111
  • 1
  • 5
9
votes
1 answer

How can I differentiate between syllable-initial [ɣ] and [ə] using Praat or other software?

I am currently studying Amdo Tibetan. In this language the voiced velar fricative [ɣ] is reported to occur as the first sound in some syllable-initial consonant clusters. More specifically, this sound occurs only before voiced consonants. (Before…
Joshua
  • 459
  • 2
  • 11
9
votes
8 answers

Is there any language where verb inflection takes place word-initially?

In the languages I know, verbal tense, number, gender, etc. is applied after the word stem. Is there any language where verb conjugation morphologically affects the beginning of a word and not the end of it?
Pablo
  • 446
  • 4
  • 16
9
votes
3 answers

Why does Pidgin come easier than Standard English?

I was born and raised in Hawaii and grew up speaking Pidgin. My parents are from Washington and California so at home I spoke [what I thought was] Standard English. I moved to the mainland when I was 18, in 1996, and have come to speak English with…
BillyNair
  • 221
  • 1
  • 8
9
votes
4 answers

Can children learn up to 4 different languages? And how to do it?

An example is parents with different mother tongues living in a foreign country, teaching those three languages and also English. How and when should this language be taught? Can all be taught in early age or only when the others are firmly…
DK39
  • 193
  • 3
  • 7
9
votes
2 answers

Can the word "said" be a determiner in written English?

Consider sentences like this one. "Reluctant to place the dog and the children in the same houses as caretakers affected by the slobbering sickness, the authorities decreed that said children would be placed in the care of the Church of the Fiery…
James Grossmann
  • 8,730
  • 8
  • 41
  • 83
9
votes
3 answers

When does language "evolve" and when is it just wrong grammar?

Lately I seem to get into a lot of discussions about stuff that is "wrong" in a language and whether it's really wrong. In my last discussion there was a native Japanese saying you can use "verb x" as both a transitive and an intransitive verb and I…
sollniss
  • 193
  • 6
9
votes
2 answers

How many words can be considered "core words"?

First of all I apologize but my English skills are by far below the complexity of the question I need to ask. I am not a specialist and my question is not related to a single language. I would like to identify the subset of "words" or maybe better,…
Lorenzo
  • 91
  • 2
9
votes
1 answer

Does the French R-sound come from Germanic influence?

Unless I'm mistaken, it is the same sound as the R in German, Yiddish, Danish,and Swedish.
Harry Anderson
  • 91
  • 4
9
votes
5 answers

Are there any known natural languages in which tense is never (or very rarely) expressed through the modification of verbs?

I should probably confess up front that I don't have a great deal of knowledge of foreign languages, but I have lately taken a strong interest in the structure and nature of language, and have spent a lot of time trying to learn about it. One thing…
TheTermiteSociety
  • 191
  • 3
9
votes
2 answers

Is IPA machine-readable?

I saw that SAMPA was created to be machine-readable. Does that mean that IPA isn't? If it isn't, why is that so? EDIT: By machine-readable, I meant that it could be directly interpreted by a parser/algorithm. More precisely, I wanted to know why I…
apat
  • 137
  • 10
9
votes
3 answers

Etymologically, why is there a v in "Giovanni"

It comes ultimately from Hebrew "Yochannon", via Greek Ioannes, from which German "Johannes" and Spanish "Juan" are very clear natural derivatives of that, given Greek had an h which was later lost (though the German borrowing must have come before…
Harry Anderson
  • 191
  • 1
  • 1
  • 2
9
votes
5 answers

difference between Isolating (analytics) vs inflected (fusional) vs agglutinative languages

It's not easy to grasp these concepts. I spent a lot of time perusing wikipedia articles but still can't really understand what makes a language: inflexed, isolating or agglutinative, Background These are languages that I know, and I would love the…
GA1
  • 1,179
  • 1
  • 11
  • 21
1 2 3
…
99 100