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1500 questions
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Origin of current order pattern in English/German
It is well-known, or better said, well-accepted, that the ancestral language Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was a OV language with a very limited (or nonexistent) use of subordinate clauses. In Proto-Germanic, subordinates was more common (but not too…
ABu
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Understanding Voiced Consonants
I've been having some trouble understanding how is it that what differentiates, for example, /p/ from /b/, is the vibration of the vocal chords, present in /b/, but not in /p/. From what I have read and have been told, /b/ can't be produced without…
Pedro Y.
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If Hebrew is written without vowels can there be multiple interpretations?
This may be a silly question though I am unsure of this is the case for Hebrew.
I know often the vowels are not shown in Hebrew in writing. Curious if it changes the words can be interpreted many ways or not.
In English for example "rd" could be…
Lain
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Is the word "abjad" borrowed from Arabic or was it coined in English then borrowed by Arabic?
"Abjad" is a technical term for a kind of writing system which is used when contrasting them with other writing system types such as alphabets, abugidas, and syllabaries.
There is also an Arabic word "أبجد".
In reading various sources on the…
hippietrail
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Is American Sign Language phonetic?
In every spoken language I'm aware of, if you read a word you are unfamiliar with, you can generally work out how to pronounce the word from how it's written. You can sound it out.
Is this kind of thing possible with American Sign Language? If no,…
Ryan_L
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How many words do we hear in a day?
With regard to the English language, how many words is the average person likely to hear (not read) on an average day. By "how many words" I don't mean how many unique words. In other words if I hear the word "get" 1000 times and "given" 10 times,…
Baz
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Do native speakers of language with lexical tone have difficulty learning another language with more or different lexical tones?
Have there been any studies done on say Mandarin native speakers who learn as adults other languages which have more lexical tones or which have lexical tones different to Mandarin?
I believe for instance that Mandarin has fewer or simpler tones…
hippietrail
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How do languages with imperfect aspect typically convey distinctions between habitual, iterative, and progressive aspects?
How does languages with imperfect aspects typically convey distinctions between habitual, iterative, and progressive aspects?
In English, which does not mark its verbs for imperfect aspect, we have progressing "-ing," we have adverbial to convey…
James Grossmann
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Historical pronunciation of Hindi यह and वह
The Hindi 3rd person singular proximal and distal pronouns यह and वह are commonly pronounced [jeː] and [ʋoː], in contrast to the [hyper-correct?] pronunciations [jəɦ(ə)] and [ʋəɦ(ə)] one might expect from their spellings.
Why are these words spelled…
iacobo
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Statistical tests of PIE laryngeal theory
The fashionable theory of PIE laryngeals offers plausible explanations for many phenomena, but plausibility is not proof. Are any implications of the postulated laryngeals amenable to statistical test? This would be the standard of proof in hard…
Bert Barrois
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Why are Latin and Sanskrit called dead languages?
I hear Latin and Sanskrit are called dead languages. Sanskrit is used in rituals and at the temples.
I think this is also true of Latin.
What is the cause of their degradation when they have enriched so many languages like English and Telugu which…
Jvlnarasimharao
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Can computational techniques solve historical problems that couldn't otherwise be solved?
Recently I've read that machine learning has been used to apply the Comparative Method (example with references here). Also, there are other mathematical approaches that have been applied to the problem of reconstructing proto-languages. For…
Qwertuy
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Where to start if you want to do Chomsky style NLP?
I am a computer science grad who has been fascinated by Chomsky's theory of language. I have been following his work and the others in his field. But I also want to try something on my own.
The problem, I don't know where to start.
Briefly, I…
Vicyan
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State-of-the-art spelling correction algorithms
According to Wikipedia
The most successful algorithm to date is Andrew Golding and Dan Roth's "Winnow-based spelling correction algorithm", published in 1999, which is able to recognize about 96% of context-sensitive spelling errors, in addition to…
Alexey Romanov
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Did the removal of Chinese characters have an impact on Korean and Vietnamese?
Korean and Vietnamese used to have Chinese characters but no longer do; there has been talk (e.g. here) of doing the same in Japanese. Has there been an impact on the language? for instance
changed pronunciations so pairs of words are no longer…
Mathieu Bouville
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