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Where did Irish "-acht" come from?
Modern Irish has a suffix -acht (allomorphs -ocht, -eacht, -cht, probably others) that forms abstract nouns. For example, beo "alive" → beocht "life, vital spirit".
Since we also see Scottish Gaelic -achd and Manx Gaelic -aght, this suffix would…
Draconis
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Can causative and anticausative co-occur in Turkish verbal morphology?
Turkish makes use of two valency markers: (i) the causative marker with 'tur' which increases valency in (1) below, and (ii) the anticausative marker 'il' which decreases valency as in (2) below.
(1)
(ben) Hasan -8 kitab -1 oku -t -tu …
Tsutsu
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Etymology of impersonal pronoun "one"
The 'impersonal' pronoun in Germanic and Romance languages seems to come from one of two paths:
Cognate with the word for 'man'
Proto-Germanic: *mann-
Dutch: men
German: man
Old English: man (< mann)
Latin: homō
French: on (< om < hom) use infl.…
iacobo
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Name for a verb form meaning "feign or pretend to do sth"
Is there an accepted name for a derivational process applied to a verb which conveys the meaning "feign or pretend to do sth".
As a corollary, is anyone aware of any languages (especially non-polysynthetic ones) that possess such a derivational…
Miztli
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8
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Relation between some linguistics terms
I am trying to draw a diagram to show relationship between these terms but I am not sure what is correct position of them is diagram. Can you please help to do that?
What is relation of following term (is-a, has-one, has-many, is-consist-of,…
Real Dreams
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8
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Who is credited for the syntax tree in synthetic linguistics
I'd like to know who is the first person that introduced the tree of phrase structure in linguistics.
E Zhang
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8
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Swiss suffix -ikon in place names
I've been wondering about the Swiss (exclusively, I think) suffix in place names like Opfikon, Oerlikon or my favourite Pfäffikon.
What is the origin of the -ikon or -likon ending? It seems particularly with Zürich area but maybe I'm not familiar…
Tomasz Pluskiewicz
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8
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Is wikipedia wrong when it speaks of the hebrew shwa not being pronounced ə?
Is wikipedia wrong when it suggests that the hebrew schwa/shva has never been pronounced as 'ə'?
Looking at these two wikipedia links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa
"The word schwa is from the Hebrew word shva (שְׁוָא IPA: [ʃva], classical…
barlop
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8
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How to define colors in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage?
The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) attempts to reduce the semantics of all lexicons down to a restricted set of semantic primitives. But in NSM, colors are not semantic primitives. How then to define words like "blue"? More generally, how to…
Bob
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8
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Usage of definite articles in Germanic and Romance languages
In the Germanic languages, a generic construction using the definite article with mass nouns is unacceptable. In contrast, Romance languages require the definite article to make the generic construction grammatical.
a.) The water is a liquid.…
Sindry
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8
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What's the longest extant dialect continuum?
According to jknappen, there's a dialect continuum stretching from Rome to Lisbon without interruption. This is a wonderfully interesting piece of trivia that I wouldn't have believed before seeing the answer.
But are there longer dialect continua…
Draconis
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8
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Why is the Romanian tense system so "simple", compared to other Romance languages?
It appears like Romanian has only 5 inflected/conjugated tenses (excluding imperative), while all other Romance languages have much more. For example, in Spanish, French and Italian, there are 7(8) tenses:
Indicative: Present, Imperfect (Imparfait…
iBug
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How similar are Talmy and Wierzbicka's theories of semantic primes?
I am an Italian PhD student in linguistics and I am interested in the analysis of the expression of Manner.
I went throught the works of Lakoff, Talmy and Wierzbicka recently and their event semantics raised some questions in me which I am not sure…
Gina
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How linguists select phonemes to construct an alphabet for a language
For languages without written alphabets, wondering how a linguist goes out in the field and determines, "hey, these are the core sounds of the language" and defines an alphabet in terms of those phonemes.
For example, I have seen languages with…
Lance
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Is usage of 'SMS language' or 'textspeak' changing in any direction?
'SMS language' or 'textspeak' was popularised due in the 90s due to the use of phones with numeric keypads. However, most smartphones these days come with autocorrect / autocomplete which outputs correct spellings for any word.
What I'm interested…
Ankur Banerjee
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