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1500 questions
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Speech rate measured in bit/sec
Are there references giving the speech rate measured in bit/sec?
I easily found references on speech rate giving measurement in phones/sec, syllables/sec or words/sec. Are there references giving the speech rate in bit/sec, i.e., answering the…
Sir Cornflakes
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How can I calculate if the difference between two word frequencies in one corpus is significant?
I want to study orthographical variants, for example:
Can firefighter and fire-fighter be considered orthographical variants (i.e. the difference in frequency in a corpus is not statistically significant), or should the one orthographical form be…
7
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1 answer
Term for borrowing an inflected form as an uninflected form
Sometimes when a word is borrowed from one language to another, what is an inflected form in the source language becomes an uninflected form in the target language. Examples of this are the Italian words "salame", "panino", and "zucchino", whose…
Psychonaut
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Why are there such things as 'time adverbs'?
Words like yesterday, today, and tomorrow are defined as adverbs. However, an adverb is a word modifying an adjective or verb (or another adverb). Words such as yesterday do not seem to modify anything of the sorts.
In reading a book about grammar,…
Jim Jam
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Tone Languages and distinguishing meaning
I am new to learning all of this and had a couple of questions.
Tone languages use pitch to distinguish words. For example, in Thai
nā with a mid-tone meaning "rice paddy".
nǎ with a rising tone meaning "thick".
Intonation languages do not make…
Becky
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What do reversed and dotted tone letters mean?
The IPA uses the 5 tone-letters ˥,˦,˧,˨,˩. Unicode also has reversed (꜒,꜓,꜔,꜕,꜖) and dotted tone bars (꜈,꜉,꜊,꜋,꜌; ꜍,꜎,꜏,꜐,꜑). What are these characters used for?
Mechanical snail
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Are doubled questions in sign languages arbitrary?
The wh- questions in sign languages crosslinguistically can be seen in clause-initial or clause-final position or in both positions. They can be seen in one of the positions in question sentence, like in the example from Austrian Sign Language…
Serpil Karabüklü
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What are the standard/best arguments against Construction Grammar?
Introductions to Construction Grammar's "construct-i-con" model often include explicit arguments against the "lexicon and rules" model on the grounds that the latter is less equipped to deal with things like "the X-er, the Y-er" or "She sneezed the…
Matt
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7
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Adverbs as NP pre-modifiers
I would like to ask about the syntactic analysis of adverbs as what is called "peripheral noun modifiers" in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, p436, which is illustrated in the following example:
Possibly the best actress in the world…
user5492
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Are there right-branching agglutinative languages?
The major agglutinative languages like Turkish and Japanese are also notable for being almost strictly left-branching, much more so than, say, English is right-branching.
Is it a coincidence, or is there a relationship or correlation between…
Adam Bittlingmayer
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What strategies for efficiency are adopted by languages with minimal phonemic inventories?
As the size of a phonemic inventory decreases, the information rate allowed by the inventory should likewise decrease. So are there any (semantico-)pragmatic or morphosyntactic strategies that languages with fewer sounds might adopt to compensate…
Polytope
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7
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Musical notation in languages with right-to-left writing
How does musical notation in languages that use right-to-left writing direction (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, Yiddish) look like? Is it right-to-left too? If not (i.e. if they use the same European left-to-right notation), how do they…
Milchar
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7
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How and why did so many French letters become silent?
It would seem that much ease of use must have been lost when a lot of French letters came to be silent - I never fail to be amazed that "il parle" and "ils parlent" are homophones, and it's very easy to conjure realistic sentences where this…
RLG
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Proper names: does grammatical gender imply natural gender?
Questions about grammatical gender abound on this forum and on other linguistics forums. It's well known that in general, grammatical gender need not coincide with natural gender.
However, I am interested in whether there exist languages in which…
jogloran
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Which modern day dialect of Aramaic is the closest one to the dialect that Jesus of Nazareth spoke in Palestine some 2000 years ago?
Which modern day dialect of Aramaic is the closest one to the dialect that Jesus of Nazareth spoke in Palestine some 2000 years ago?
In this video, The Modern Aramaic dialects of the Christians and Jews of Iraq and Iran with Geoffrey Khan, he…
Ken Graham
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