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1500 questions
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What constitutes a Long Distance Dependency, and how can it be quantified?
To come to a computational and statistical analysis of some machine translated texts, a colleague of mine wants to quantify Long Distance Dependencies. The problem is, that we cannot seem to find sources that actually puts down a solid definition of…
Bram Vanroy
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What prevents certain grammatical forms to be analysed as one word?
When analysing a language, when do we analyse certain morphemes as one word as opposed to multiple, or is this arbitrary?
For instance, I could make the claim that (in certain cases) 'a/an' is a bound morpheme, and I could analyse it as a prefix on…
AJF
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How to determine the direction of conversion?
Recently I have been researching the topic of nominalizations. I learned that such structures might be created by means of morphological derivation (be it affixes, clitics, light verbs) or zero-derivation. I also learned that a term "conversion"…
kash
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Are there languages where the tense depends on time elapsed between events?
In all the languages I am familiar with (mostly English and my native German as well as some rudimentary Italian and French, so all somewhat related.), the tense of a verb only indicates the time of an action comparatively with another or the…
mlk
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Are there any languages where the first person cannot be an object?
In some languages, nouns low on the animacy hierarchy, particularly inanimates cannot surface as A, and if a situation arises where they are underlyingly A, some reparative strategy such as a passive must be used. Some theorise that this was the…
Gufferdk
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How does Tok Pisin get by with just a few prepositions?
I know the language only has 'two' prepositions (though there seems to be a some dispute to that). Regardless, the two prepositions 'long' and 'bilong' seem to be quite broad in definition.
I do wonder though how this works in practice. Note that…
user19661
7
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Word for eighteen expressed as Twenty Minus Two
Other than Latin, are there any languages that have a word for the number 18 that means twenty minus two?
A quick glance at some of the numeral systems of languages in the Indo-European reveal that 20 - 1 is common and there are some 30 - 1 words.…
SPA
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Why is 't' sometimes pronounced like 'ch'?
Why is the 't' pronounced like 'ch' sometimes or even like "t+sh"? Do the English phonotactics allow for a word to start with "ch+r" ('ch' as in 'chair', not as in 'Christmas')?
This doesn't appear to be true for all languages. The 't' (three) in…
FlatAssembler
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Why do languages retain or re-create complexity?
It seems to me (but I may be wrong), that languages tend to evolve towards simplification. Some examples I can think of: loss of declinations in Romance languages or in English, loss of 2nd person specific conjugation in Portuguese (plural in…
bli
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Are there any languages that either effectively don't have verbs or that somehow get around using a "standard" verb system?
By this, I'm asking whether there are languages (natural or constructed) which somehow function without verbs, relying instead upon other types of words like prepositions or something like that.
Ultimately, the purpose of verbs is to describe the…
Morella Almånd
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Were/are there any languages that decline(d) articles but not nouns?
This question is actually spawned from a rather embarrassing personal blunder years ago, that was that when I had first begun to learning an heavily inflected language, I had made the mistake of assuming that if an article declined, then it carried…
Matthew T. Scarbrough
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Why is it problematic to assume a null morpheme signifying the singular number of nouns in German?
In a lecture, my professor said that assumig a null morpheme signifying the singular number of nouns in German is problematic. Now I´m wondering why. The issue came up during a discussion on whether or not morphemes should be defined as the smallest…
LittleD
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Examples of Umlaut in a living language
For a teaching material I needed a good example of vocalic mutation of the root, aka Umlaut, and I got stuck at the fact that, while the Umlaut is often postulated for some reconstructed languages, there seem to be few, if any, good examples of this…
Artemij Keidan
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Turkish "Yaz" vs. Azerbaijani "Yaz"
In some Turkic languages (like Turkish and Kazakh), the word Yaz means Summer, while in other Turkic languages (like Azeri, Chuvash and Yakut) the very same word means Spring. The Old Turkic meaning was also Summer, so it seams that the Azeri group…
Mousa
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Why is [ð] so rare?
Why is the vocalized dental fricative [ð] so rare across languages? Is it just a coincidence or is there a pattern behind this?
Probably
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