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1500 questions
7
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3 answers
I have my hair cut - "my hair" a Direct Object?
I am confused about the following sentence:
I have my hair cut.
Now here I am not sure whether "my hair" is the Direct Object (DO) of the verb "have", or if it is just the subject of the Past Participle Clause "my hair cut". If the latter case is…
Man_From_India
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8 answers
Why are artificial languages created always by individuals and not by international institutions?
Do linguists and scientist have some international coordinated program/authority where the goal is to create the artificial language for all peoples on this planet?
As far as I know, this was always done by individuals instead of organisations.…
Derfder
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7
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2 answers
Why did the softness of the L in the OCS word "велми" reflect so unpredictably into today's languages?
The OCS word "велми", meaning "very" and surviving in several Slavic languages today, is quite a conundrum to me in terms of how it has reflected into the living languages of today. It appears to bear the inherently soft Slavic L sound if one were…
Adam Kamil Gola
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7
votes
3 answers
Is there use of a trilled "L" sound in any language? Is a trilled "L" even possible?
I've seen nothing on a trilled "L" sound anywhere. I've tried producing the trilled "L" sound and I can get something that seems similar. Is it possible to trill an "L" and if so are there any languages that use this sound?
Kotoka
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7
votes
2 answers
What is Ś in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform?
In a few different places (1) (2), ORACC lists Ś (S with acute accent, U+015A) as a Unicode character used for Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform transcription.
However, I've never seen this letter used (in ORACC or anywhere else), and am not sure what it…
Draconis
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7
votes
2 answers
What's going on with ŠÁR?
While most cuneiform signs are made up of wedges, hence the name, there seems to be one striking exception: the sign ŠÁR (aka ŠAR₂ aka ). Some sources (like the Hethitisches Zeichenlexikon) list it as identical to ḪI, a pattern of four small…
Draconis
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7
votes
1 answer
Preposition and postposition at the same time?
In sentences like two days before Easter, "Easter" is the complement of the preposition "before", but what about the complement "two days"? Seeing that we can also say two days before, with "before" as an adverb, my guess is that "before" is a…
maliktunga
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7
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1 answer
Why did Finnish and Sami noun-final A and I flip over?
I noticed a weird sound correspondence between Finnish and Northern Sami, and that is a list of words which pairwise end in -a or -ä in Finnish (this is the same archephoneme), and end in -i in Northern Sami.
päivä, beaivi. A day. Or, a sun.
aika,…
Omar and Lorraine
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Are analytic languages easier to learn compared to synthetic languages?
I believe the Czech linguist Karel Oliva mentioned it somewhere that analytic languages are like a hill - one can make a progress relatively easily from the beginning but there's always more to learn (phrases, idioms) while synthetic languages are…
Probably
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7
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What is the name of the grammatical aspect conveyed by the English auxiliary "keep"?
All the English speakers in this group are familiar with the use of "keep" to convey persistent action, whether the action is repeated (He kept knocking the ball off the table) or maintained (The ball kept rolling.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I…
James Grossmann
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7
votes
2 answers
Sumerian cuneiform dictionary?
Is there a single, unified place where one can look up cuneiform signs for Sumerian words? Unicode now supports cuneiform, but every source I've found has only transliterations, not actual cuneiform.
For example, I'd like to find this:
instead…
Joe
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7
votes
3 answers
What does linguistics call sets of words with the same spelling, different (but perhaps related) meaning, and different emphasized syllables?
In my idiolect, the word "defense", with the emphasis on the first syllable means "the role of defending". With the emphasis on the second syllable, it means "the act of defending". A similar (though not quite as clean) distinction applies to the…
Scott Deerwester
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7
votes
4 answers
Are the longest German and Turkish words really single words?
First, I don't speak/understand any so-called agglutinative languages, like Turkish. I also don't know German.
I understand there's no good definition for the concept of "word", which could apply to all languages. But for the sake of this…
GA1
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7
votes
2 answers
Apparent exceptions to the sound law f -> h in old Spanish
At some point during the evolution of Spanish, several initial [f] became silent (this is represented with an h in modern Spanish). This explains words such as hacer, harina, herir and many more. However, there are many words in modern Spanish which…
Qwertuy
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7
votes
3 answers
Advances in Glottochronology
I have read some old works on lexicostatistics and glottochronology, like Swadesh's original articles or this work, where using Swadesh's basic assumptions, the author obtains a temporal estimation for the separation between two mexican languages.…
Qwertuy
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