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Cross-linguistic association between velarization and pharyngealization
Articulatorily, velarization and pharyngealization are distinct, but they are often conflated in linguistic analyses I've seen:
Conflating them is common enough, I presume, that the IPA allocates the tilde-overlay diacritic for…
Mechanical snail
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Understanding the reflexes of PIE *ǵneh3- in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek
Today I was trying to reconstruct some PIE roots by myself and I came across the word for '(to) know' in different indo-european languages. Here are some examples:
Eng. (to) know
It. conoscere
Lat. (g)nōscō (I know); nōtus (known)…
Tochtli
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Status of "Mmm" or "Hmm"
I would like to know whether nasally produced sounds like "Mmmm" or "Hmmm" constitute verbal or non-verbal language. Essentially I am a language testing professional, operating within very narrowly defined boundaries of permissible interaction. In…
David Buchanan
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What are the differences between palatal consonant and palatalized consonant?
In IPA chart, there is a column named "palatal consonants", including consonants as ɲ, c, ɟ, ç, ʝ, ʎ for example.
There is also a 'palatalization sign': ʲ, which can be applied to all consonants, used, for example, in Slavic languages.
What are the…
mklcp
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Do languages besides the Kartvelian family have a property of verbs called "version"?
I'm currently studying the Georgian language and it has quite a few interesting properties not common in more well known languages.
One property of the verb is called "version", "version markers" or "versioners". And it is used to describe the role…
hippietrail
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Why does Polish use "w" instead of "v"?
Polish spells /v/ as "w", and the "v" letter does not exist in the language. The other slavic languages using the latin alphabet are in a reverse situation, "v" is used exclusively and "w" does not exist.
What accounts for Polish's differentiation…
EMBLEM
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L2 acquisition as a factor in loss of "complex" grammatical features
Recently I came across a short text on Language Log briefly discussing a phenomenon which seems to affect certain languages. The author noticed that loss or heavy weakening of inflection during language's histories tend to be concomitant with…
czypsu
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Are there languages with contrasting unvoiced aspirated, unaspirated, and ejective stops?
In English there are just two series of stops, voiced (b, d, g) and unvoiced (p, t, k). The latter are generally aspirated (though it depends on phonological context).
In many common languages of Europe and Asia the unvoiced consonants are not…
hippietrail
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Is there an automatic way of identifying transitive verbs in Computational Linguistics?
Is there any straightforward way of identifying transitive verbs (or sentences containing transitive constructions) in an BrE English text?
I've looked into semantic shallow parsers, such as Semafor, but these don't seem to offer the straightforward…
Julie
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What is it called when a word is constructed out of a language, but is not a part of that language?
I am not a linguist in any way shape or form, but I am studying Japanese, and came across this linguistic issue that fascinates me.
Over on the Japanese Language and Usage site, there is a discussion about a word "flyjin".
The word was create by…
Questioner
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Is there a difference between the terms `plosive` and `stop`?
A sound like the voiceless retroflex stop get's sometimes called a stop and sometimes a plosive. Are the terms completely synonymous or do they have a slightly different meaning?
Christian
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Is there a cross-linguistic subdivision of phones in signed languages akin to how all spoken languages have vowel and consonant phones?
After reading Joe Martin's enlightening answer to the question "Are there counterparts to phones and phonetics for signed languages?" I immediately began to wonder how much further spoken and signed phones' similarities might go.
For instance in all…
hippietrail
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Can Old Church Slavonic be considered an artificial language?
How much was Old Church Slavonic edited by Constantine and Methodius? And what modified more: The Old Church Slavonic when people in Bohemia started to write with it, or the slavic dialect they used before?
Probably
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What program can I use to make a tree of a language family?
I'm not looking to make anything really special looking, I'd just like to make basic branches going down to draw a family tree. I tried Paint but that's difficult to edit, and Word wouldn't be easy to make into an image.
I'm hoping to find out what…
Sue
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What do we know about primary language loss?
Living for the past five years in countries in which English is not the native language has left me feeling that my use of my native tongue has somewhat diminished in daily speech. When I talk to my family back home, for example, I feel myself…
user10982