Linguistics Stack Exchange
Linguistics Stack Exchange

Most Popular

more tags
1500 questions
8
votes
1 answer

Agglutination in Proto-Indo-European

Based on numerous sources, it seems clear that Proto-Indo-European was Productively agglutinative with non-root morphemes (and perhaps some specific roots that are also able to act like bound morphemes), and Derivationally agglutinative with…
Justin Olbrantz
  • 111
  • 2
8
votes
2 answers

What are the motivations for which direction syntactic trees are built in (top down or bottom up)?

When I learned x-bar theory, there seemed to be an implicit assumption that trees were built top-down, from IP or CP to the VP and its complement, etc. However, as I am learning more about Minimalism (keep in mind I still know very, very little), I…
user325
8
votes
1 answer

What is the approximate time of the loss of the intervocalic /s/ in Greek?

Teachers of Ancient Greek at my university have always been emphasising the importance of being aware of the loss of the intervocalic sigma in the language's history, because it helped to understand some seemingly peculiar inflectional paradigms (…
czypsu
  • 1,416
  • 9
  • 16
8
votes
2 answers

Confused about vowel diagram (Vowel chart)! Can you clarify & explain how to read it?

Ok, here is the English vowel chart: I'm really confused, what do "front" "central", "back", "close(high)", "close-mid", "open-mid", "open (low)" mean? Ok, Here is what I understood, please correct me if I am wrong. Ok, let's look at the vowel /i/…
Tom
  • 191
  • 3
  • 5
8
votes
2 answers

How are phones distributed across languages?

By making a quick comparison among several language phonologies (from various language families), I could observe that some phones occur very frequently, such as [m], [p], [b], [h], [a] and [i]. Others seem to be much rarer, among which, [ʕ], [ɰ],…
Otavio Macedo
  • 8,208
  • 5
  • 45
  • 110
8
votes
3 answers

The hunger for single words

Over on English Language and Usage, there are many, many questions of the form "What is a single word for [phrase]". The poster usually seems to be very keen to use a single word — which may be obscure, or have a subtly different meaning — than to…
slim
  • 191
  • 5
8
votes
3 answers

Why does word-initial upsilon always have a rough breathing?

How did a rough breathing develop before all words starting with an upsilon in Ancient Greek? This is a commonly noted fact about the distribution of these sounds (or rather spellings), but I’m having a hard time figuring out the etymological reason…
brass tacks
  • 18,116
  • 1
  • 45
  • 91
8
votes
3 answers

What is the distribution of English dialects that pronounce -day as -[deɪ] vs -[di]?

The days of the week in English, such as Monday, are sometimes pronounced with a final -[deɪ] and sometimes with a final -[di]. For example, Merriam-Webster gives Monday as \ˈmən-(ˌ)dā, -dē\ and Wiktionary gives /ˈmʌn.deɪ/, /ˈmʌn.di/. This is…
Mark Beadles
  • 6,860
  • 2
  • 24
  • 46
8
votes
2 answers

Why is "och" (and) not spelled "og" in Swedish?

For example, here is the word for "I" in the Old Norse dialects. Old East Norse = Jak Old West Norse = Ek These words became, with a natural evolution, the following: Icelandic = Ég Faroese = Eg Bokmål = Jeg Nynorsk = Eg Danish = Jeg Swedish =…
DisplayName
  • 537
  • 5
  • 14
8
votes
2 answers

Has grammatical gender ever been observed to emerge in a language that previously had none?

Does a language exist whose older forms are known to have lacked the category of grammatical gender, and which proceeded to evolve one (perhaps from a non-gender-based system of noun classes)? Are "pre-gender" stages of language evolution, where…
Nikolay Ershov
  • 987
  • 7
  • 14
8
votes
5 answers

Is there a name for a word which can take both genders?

For languages with two genders, is there a name for a noun (or pronoun, adjective, etc) which can be of either gender? This seems to be quite common for names of professions, for instance, in Latin based languages: dentista (Spanish,…
Flimzy
  • 622
  • 1
  • 5
  • 19
8
votes
2 answers

Can the /m/ sound in a 1st person pronoun be considered a linguistic universal?

For example, english: me, mine, my Russian: мне, меня, мой Estonian: mina, mind, mulle How prevalent is this in world's languages and what should it be attributed to?
Moshanator
  • 183
  • 4
8
votes
4 answers

Why in English words is [o] followed by [ʊ]?

The close-mid back rounded vowel is usually diphthongized to [oʊ] or [əʊ] in North America and respectively, Britain. Examples: row, also. In fact, in the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary I didn't see o standing by itself. In some other…
Bogdan Lataianu
  • 223
  • 1
  • 3
  • 17
7
votes
2 answers

Is there any corpus for technical English? (E.g., computers, IT, modern technology)

Alternatively, do any larger corpora have categories that pertain to technology, computer science, etc.? Or collections of English documentation and/or manuals related to modern devices, interfaces, technology products, etc.?
E.J. White
  • 71
  • 3
7
votes
7 answers

Do other languages distinguish the verbs "to drink" when talking about alcohol?

It's interesting that English uses the verb "to drink" intransitively exclusively when talking about alcohol, as in: I drink a lot. But transitively when talking about anything else, as in: I drink water. I want to know if many languages make…
Lou
  • 1,280
  • 11
  • 22
1 2 3
…
99 100