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Measuring oral comprehensibility between different language
Recently I was wondering whether some languages are inherently more comprehensible when spoken, than others. Has this been measured in any way?
To make things more precise, let's define a "please say again" (PSA) phrase a remark uttered by someone…
Dominic van der Zypen
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What are some reasons languages get picked as source languages for neologisms
For example, Latin is a source language for new words in English and other European languages, and I know English, Sanskrit and Arabic are also source languages in many other languages.
What are the reasons that languages get picked for that? What…
Louis Rhys
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When people converse in sign language, why do they make whispering sounds?
Recently in the bus I sat next to two persons conversing* in sign language.
In their conversation, they were not only using gestures and mimics for expressing what they wanted to say but also were constantly making whispering sounds all the time…
Bruder Lustig
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Are the inflectional endings in English known to have evolved from separate words or do they go too far back into PIE to know?
English isn't a highly inflected language, but it did evolve from one and still has at least: -s, -es; -ed, -ing; -er, -est; for nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Do we know if these all evolved from separate words, or do they go too far back into PIE…
hippietrail
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Is redundancy in language really impossible? (Case of the Spanish imperfect subjunctive)
I have heard time and again that languages will reject words and structures that are redundant. That is, for example, if though two words may seem like they are perfect synonyms (e.g., rotund and corpulent), we will find that they actually differ…
Tim Gorichanaz
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Is there a measure for grammatical similarity?
Something I see from time to time is the proportion of words from various sources, e.g. English has about 29% French, 29% Latin, 26% Germanic and 6% Greek words. I've never seen anything similar with grammar.
One of the languages I'm learning at the…
CJ Dennis
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How do SOV languages develop agreement affixes on verb?
According to WALS, most languages using SOV as basic order of subject, object and verb have some kind of personal agreement markers. As far as I know, these affixes rise by grammaticalization of clitic personal pronouns, when the clitics are…
revenant
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What arguments support Alwin Kloekhorst's analysis of proto-indo-european phonemes?
in short:
Is there any discussion available online of the following reinterpretation (due to Alwin Kloekhorst) of the stops in the Indo-European phoneme inventory?
classical inventory reinterpretation
p t ḱ k kʷ → p: t: kʲ: k: kʷ
b d …
suizokukan
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How does Kaldi compare with Mozilla DeepSpeech in terms of speech recognition accuracy?
How does Kaldi ASR compare with Mozilla DeepSpeech in terms of the speech recognition accuracy (e.g., in terms of word error rate)?
Franck Dernoncourt
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Geolinguistics: how many languages to talk to 50|90%
If someone wanted to talk to 50 or even 75% of the population, how many languages would he have to learn?
Are there maps showing how language speakers are distributed? In many cases it's not safe to assume that all citizens speak the national…
garter gürtel
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Rules for glottal stop insertion across languages
Many languages lack phonemic glottal stops, but regularly insert them. For example:
English invariably inserts glottal stops before utterance-initial vowels, and often before word-initial vowels when enunciating:
/ˈɔw ˈnɔw/ [/ˈɔwˈnɔ́ẁ/] 'Oh…
Mechanical snail
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Phonemic similarities between "mother" and "father" in different language families
The words for "mother" and "father" in at least a few language families have a phonetic similarity which I find interesting. Compare the Latin and Greek words (μήτηρ/πατήρ mater/pater) with the (ancient) Hebrew words (אב/אם) with the Mandarin words…
ktm5124
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Why is the verb "to need" and "to observe" always imperfective in Slavic languages?
I have been reading into Balto-Slavic languages and come across a problem. "To need" is always imperfective.
If I use the imperfective past verb, "to need," I am going to be still, presently needing something (because the verb is viewed…
Anon
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Are fusional languages easier to learn than isolating languages?
As some of you may know, auxlangers tend towards isolating languages. At the very least, the direct object is determined by word order rather than with a case ending (mostly because most West Europeans struggle to understand the accusative suffix in…
user19661
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Can Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian be considered linguistically distinct?
I grew up the in the former Yugoslavia, and the language I studied in school was called Serbocroatian, which was spoken in four out of the six republics of the union. When the country fell apart, the nationalist politicians (all of them) wanted to…
amphibient
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