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What does the term "ontology" mean vis a vis the study of natural language?
Many of us know that the term "ontology" applies to the a priori philosophical study of the nature of existence. Ontology is a branch of metaphysics (the attempt to coherently characterize reality a priori in the most general terms possible). So,…
James Grossmann
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Relationship between language similarity and ease of foreign language acquisition?
Inspired by this infographic, which lists a bunch of languages as either easy to learn, hard to learn, or medium. I noticed that all the languages in the easy category were either Romance or Germanic languages, about half of the medium category was…
Lucky
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How do proponents of Indo-Uralic explain the major differences between the consonant systems of pIE and pUralic?
I've been interested in Historical Linguistics (as a hobby) for quite a while and one of the recent topics that caught my attention was the hypothesis of Kortlandt, Bomhard, and others that Indo-European languages originated through an amalgamation…
Newbie
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Origin of Present Perfect in Romance Languages
Since in Latin no compound form of verb tense exists, AFAIK, I thought that origin of Present Perfect should be sought in Proto-Germanic also for Romance languages, but I found out that Present Perfect exists in Romanian as well and I think that…
Gary MacKenna
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How are Baltic and Slavic languages related?
What are their common characteristics?
I was reading about it on Wikipedia but didn't understand much since I have no background in linguistics. I would appreciate if someone could just name some basic common features (without too much rigor if…
lmc
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Are different varieties of German closer to each other than different Slav languages?
Are different varieties of German (e.g. Bavarian and Low German) closer to each other than different Slav languages (e.g. Russian and Polish)?
The lexical distance map from…
MWB
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Are there languages with more than three degrees of comparison?
In English and other languages there are three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative and superlative (e.g. tall, taller, tallest). Are there languages with more than three degrees, expressed morphologically?
iddober
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Is math a language?
Is math a language? Is "language" a comprehensive description of mathematics? Maybe this is just a trivial description... or possibly there something about mathematics that is missed by describing it so... Certainly math is far more restricted than…
MmmHmm
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Are Semitic and Indo-European languages at all related?
I can't help but notice word pairs between Arabic and some European languages that seem to be cognate, such as:
Sabah "seven"/ German Sieben also "seven"
Ktab "book"/ English tablet (both something written on)
hadith "saying"/ Italian ditto…
Harry Anderson
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Are non-spoken elements, such as capitalization and punctuation mark usage, part of the English language?
On the English Language Learners SE meta site, I'm involved in a conversation that I find somewhat bizarre. In the order in which they appear, here are the assertions (paraphrased with supporting quotes) made by the user with whom I started the…
Kyle Strand
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What is the name of the phoneme produced in an upper-class Briton's pronunciation of the word "Duke"? What's different in the articulation?
This question has been copied directly from English Language & Usage where it received plenty of interest but the answers had lots of flaws and no resolutions was reached. It was originally asked by user Billaire I urge you to please read the…
hippietrail
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Do there exist languages with wh-prepositions?
I can imagine a language where instead of "what did you put a toy on?" one says something like "whon did you put a toy?". Do such languages exist?
syntaxfairy
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What numeral system is on this Hyderabad banknote?
This banknote from Hyderabad (Hyderabadi rupee) has five different numerals in the circles on the right and left sides. From the bottom they are Hindu-Arabic, Kannada, Marathi and Telugu. But what is the one in the top? I believe the rest of the…
Alfred Godoy
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Pro-drop and V2
I have a question about languages that say "this thing must be the second element in the sentence. For example, German says that in a statement, the finite verb must be the second thing. If you front an adverb, then the subject gets put third. Like…
Omar and Lorraine
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Lexical similarity among languages used in Southeast Asia
Among many languages used in Southeast Asia (especially I want to talk about Malay, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Thai), is there any study about which pair of languages is close to each other in vocabulary?
For example, there is a study about a lexical…
Blaszard
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