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1500 questions
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Who practiced morphophonemics?
In the modern textbooks you can easily find such claims as the following from Hayes 2009:
In the 1940s and 1950s, many phonologists worked with a theory in which (roughly) all neutralizing rules were assumed to apply before all allophonic rules.…
Artemij Keidan
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8
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Why does “&” look nothing like e and t
“&” (ampersand) was from a ligature of e and t. but it looks nothing like e and t put together. Why?
Keon N
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8
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How and when did the modern western convention of not translating personal names arise?
In many languages it is a convention to translate or at least adapt foreign personal names to the language when discussing foreign people, especially notable and often mentioned people such as foreign regents, popes etc.
Historically, it seems this…
Sami Liedes
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8
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Why are French nouns in -eur feminine when their latin origin in -or is masculine?
The suffix -eur in modern French typically gives feminine nouns: erreur, ferveur, torpeur, fureur. (Confusingly there's also -(a)teur which gives masculine nouns, but it seems etymologically separate).
The original suffix in Latin is -or, with words…
zale
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How did Latin "aqua" became Sardinian "abba" and Romanian "apă"?
The way I believe it happened was by the change of "w" into "v" and the fall of the velar "k". Furthermore, betacism caused the change of "v" to "b" in this word. Only in Romanian, maybe because of the inclination towards unvoiced consonants, "v"…
SarruKen
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8
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Is a word/letter?
Can "" (the Face with Tears of Joy emoji) be technically considered a word, from a linguistic point of view?
Obviously, emoji are different from "ordinary" words, but:
"" was the Oxford Word of the Year 2015 (emphasis added)
"" has an entry in…
Kellie
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8
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/t͡ʃ/ vs. /ʧ/ vs. /tʃ/
In English for example, the "ch" sound (as in China) is sometimes written as /t͡ʃ/, other times as /ʧ/ or simply as /tʃ/. Similarly, I have seen the German "tz" (e.g. Katze) transcribed as /t͡s/, /ʦ/ and /ts/.
Is there an "official" recommendation…
E.E.S.
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8
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How do we know that Ancient Greek didn't have ejectives?
Ancient Greek had a three way contrast between voiced, unvoiced, and aspirated stops. It seems to be assumed that the unvoiced stops were pulmonic, but how do we know this?
A fact that may or may not have any bearing is that when there would…
user39080
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8
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Where does Google's pronunciation notation come from?
When you search for "X pronunciation" on Google, it shows the "Sounds like x·y·z" box with phonetic respelling. Does anyone know if this respelling system is based on a particular dictionary or established phonetic notation for British/American…
linda
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8
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Mechanism(s) as to how the pronunciations of「也」and its Old Chinese "homophones"/phonetically-derivative glyphs drifted to the modern range of sounds?
In my question on Chinese.SE, I learned that the modern character for "earth, ground"「地」(dì) used to be written in a multitude of ways, using either 「也」,「豕」, or「它」as phonetic components. Compare the Baxter-Sagart reconstructions of the OC (Old…
D.R
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8
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The "writer / rider" distinction
In some dialects of English (for example: General American), “writer” is said to be pronounced differently from “rider” due to the following two phonological rules (done in this order):
Vowels are longer before voiced consonants (than before…
Adil Khan
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8
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What is the notion of lemma?
Psycholinguistically, a lemma is an abstract conceptual form of a word. However from a lexicographic perspective, the lemma is merely the aorist or canonical form of a word.
In English, the lemma of a verb is the 3rd person singular form; for a…
alvas
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Is Esperanto accepting new root words?
Is Esperanto accepting new root words?
Or is this process done and you can create new words only by combining existing ones?
Derfder
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German Place Names ending in -AU
I recently traveled in Bavaria. I was struck by the prevalence of place names ending in -au, like Donau, Passau, Oberammergau, and Dachau... I looked up the dictionary, and found the word aue which according to Langenscheidt means "pasture, meadow".…
ian tarnbis
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8
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Influence of the regulatory bodies in the English language
Where could I find/read about studies about the influence in English of the lack of regulatory bodies of its use and lexicon?
It is easy to google and find long arguments on the topic. I am interested in studies that at least attempt to be…
Anna Taurogenireva
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