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3 answers

Why do some Indo-European languages have genders and some don't?

In some languages, like German and French, every noun has a gender and each gender has its article. Whereas languages like English and Persian do not have genders. Why is that? Even though these languages belong to the same family of languages. What…
AziZ
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Are there any languages that have a pronoun which is only used to refer to royalty?

I can recall reading an article years ago which claimed that some languages have unused "royal" pronouns. That is, these pronouns were only used to refer to royalty as a show of respect or reverence, however, such pronouns had apparently fallen out…
ZZZ
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Do any languages mark social distinctions other than gender and status?

Many languages have pronouns that reflect gender, and some have pronouns that reflect relative social hierarchy or formality. (To pick an example I actually know, in Dutch the second person singular polite/formal is u vs jij or je for informal.) I…
Jim Davis
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Paucal number without singular

I have usually seen the paucal number presented as intermediate between singular and plural in the languages that have it: singular - just one paucal - a few plural - many However, is there any language that only distinguishes between paucal and…
JSBձոգչ
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Which animal is closest to having language and why?

Apart from humans, which animal do linguists currently think has a communication system that is closest to being considered real language? "Language" meaning whatever linguists currently understand it to mean, as far as I'm aware that's a system of…
minseong
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Is J. R. R. Tolkien's "translation" scheme found in real life?

A summary of J. R. R. Tolkien's "translation" methodology: J. R. R. Tolkien was best known for his fantasy world - Middle-earth. He almost always presented his works as translated from ancient documents that somehow were passed down to him,…
Eugene
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What is the proper definition of a verb?

I do apologise if the question is wordy, but I feel some context is required for me to stand any chance of finding a satifactory answer. I have been struggling to understand why the word "is" counts as a verb in English. This lead me to search for…
user3273084
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What method do linguists use to rate language competence?

People on the street bandy about words like "fluent", "knows French", "speaks broken French" as if it all means something. How do linguists determine if a speaker is competent and what taxonomy do they use to separate those who are remarkably fluent…
MatthewMartin
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Are there any studies on some English passive verb constructions currently being replaced by new intransitive senses?

In the past couple of years I've noticed a new trend in younger generations of native English speakers, at least in American English and Australian English. But I can't find it discussed anywhere on the internet yet, not in linguistics papers, not…
hippietrail
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Languages which changed their writing direction

I am interested in account of languages that had undergone a change in the writing direction somewhere in the history. We might say, for example, that Greek was used to be written also (not sure if that was the dominant way) leftward some 2500 years…
d_e
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What is the name for a placename that contains what the thing is in a different language?

For example Mount Maunganui. In Māori maunganui means "large mountain" and thus when literally translated into English it means "Mount Large Mountain". Another example would be the river Avon. In Brythonic avon means river and thus when literally…
Shannon Blackhall
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Is the schwa sound consistent?

The first syllable in "about" (ə'baʊt) is schwa, so is the second one in the "salad" ('sæləd), but iv'e never heard them pronounced the same way. in salad it sounds more like the i in "trick". mountain ('maʊntən) also has a schwa at the end, but to…
Binyamin
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In languages with grammatical gender, how do they determine the gender when a new word has been created?

In languages with grammatical gender that has (almost) no morphological relation between the words and the genders(e.g. French), how do they determine the gender of a new word that has been introduced/created? I think that as people don't speak…
Sindry
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How are mathematical operators like "plus" and "cos" analyzed?

Consider the mathematical statement 1 + 2 = 3 It is read in English as One plus two equals three. One plus two is equal to three. In English at least, equals is obviously an ordinary verb, but the analysis of "one plus two" isn't obvious. Some…
Mechanical snail
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What are the different schools of PIE reconstruction?

I have read some works on Proto-Indo-European which mention different schools that advocate for different paradigms of reconstruction, such as the Leiden and the Erlangen schools. I'd like to know if there are any other such schools and a quick…
Aryaman
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