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Are there other languages, besides English, where the indefinite (or definite) article varies based on sound?
I was talking today with an English co-worker about whether he says "an H-1B visa" or "a H-1B visa", which hinges on whether one says "aitch" or "haitch" for the letter H.
And I noticed that unlike other languages such as German or French or…
Kyralessa
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Is there a language with dual indefinite articles?
At university, we have been looking into language change, and seeing how for example "one" was used as the singular indefinite article, which changed into "a", but a question arose about whether or not there exists a language with a dual indefinite…
Lexipaichnidi
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Which languages have Subject-object agreement in relative clauses?
I am working on relative clauses in Kyrgyz. Kyrgyz and some other Turkic languages show agreement of subject with object in relative clauses, instead of the verb. It is an SVO language.
Menin okugan kitabim
I-Gen read-rel.suf. book-1st…
Dariya
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Do loanwords usurp existing words?
When a loanword enters a language, does it usually replace an existing native word or phrase? Or does it more often lead to an increase in the size of the language's vocabulary?
Regarding Japanese's influence on English, most of the words are new…
Golden Cuy
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Which Romance Language is the least similar to Latin?
People state that Romanian is closest in some aspects (grammar mainly), and that to learn a romance language studying latin may give you a leg up (which in my opinion just study the language), but for what language would this be uniquely bad for?…
Michael Valentin
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Is there a term for ASL signs for related concepts that share the same motion and are distinguished by initialization?
As an ASL learner, I've noticed that there are groups of words with similar meanings, where the only difference is an initialized handshape. For example, the sign FAMILY has the two hands move outward tracing two halves of a circle, with an F…
octern
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Why has the neuter gender disappeared from almost all the modern Romance languages?
Why has the neuter gender disappeared from almost all the modern Romance languages? It was completely common in Latin.
And when exactly did this happen? Did it happen in Latin itself, or only after Latin split into multiple languages and the…
Honza Zidek
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"Ring species" as dialect continuum?
In biology, ring species is a population of subspecies in a geographically ring-shaped region, where individuals are close (in terms of interbreeding) if they live close to each other, but between the two "ends" they don't get along. Below is the…
puzzlet
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Apart from French, does any language have voicing-dependent change of place of articulation?
The outcome of Romance velar palatalization in French depends on the voicing of the consonant: Lat. ankilla → OFr. [antsele] but Lat. argilla → OFr. [ardʒile]. This is also reflected in words borrowed into English ("cent" with [s], "gentle" with…
user6726
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Development of diphthongs
Is there a specific reason for which diphthongs in German and English words like "mein" and "like" arose? It seems to be a pretty common phenomenon, but somehow it seems to be limited to Germanic languages. The same question could apply to "Haus"…
X30Marco
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Is there a digital corpus somewhere of pre-Latin Vietnamese text?
I like as a hobby to do text processing and analysis of CJKV text.
Japanese and Chinese is of course available in near infinite quantities.
Korean is a bit harder to find, but not impossible.
Vietnamese though has not been written in Han Characters…
hippietrail
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Which alphabetic writing system first had spaces between words?
Just recently, I believed that spaces between words were first invented with the Carolingian minuscule, invented by the English scholar Alcuin of York. As I just discovered, spacing wasn't first ever used with Alcuin's Carolingian minuscule.…
arara
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How did the complexities of Arabic cardinals arise?
Generally the grammar related to the numbers in Arabic is considered to be the most complicated thing about the language. In fact, it is considered so complicated that many teachers argue that not even Arabs use it correctly. . . . — All the…
gen-ℤ ready to perish
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Are people's names considered morphemes of a language?
For example, is "Donald" a morpheme of the English language?
I can see reasons for and against.
Reasons for:
It allows us to say stuff like "a language is a function from sequences of morphemes of it to meanings". If "Donald" is not a morpheme of…
extremeaxe5
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Does the Finnish translative case exist in other languages?
The Finnish translative case expresses the concept of becoming or turning into something else. Does this case exist in other languages, or is it unique to Finnish? How is this concept most commonly expressed in other inflected languages?
jrdioko
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