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1500 questions
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Treatment of or collective term for constructions with no*, some*, any*, every*

Many languages have a little subsystem that uses a combination of particles of no*, some*, any*, every* or similar to create related question and negation words. This is what the system roughly looks like this in English: With complete sets…
Dominik Lukes
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How do Indian short form of names work in the USA?

I noticed many Indians choose to abbreviate their names when they are in a foreign country because it's difficult for foreigners to pronounce them, especially if they are longer. So when an Indian meets an American, he doesn't go by his full…
PixelPower
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How did it happen that K was introduced to Latin alphabet in place of C and C started to mark /t͡s/ or /s/ in many languages?

I know that K has been derived from Greek kappa and C from gamma. But how did it happen that people started to use K in place of C? From what I know there were already C and G in the Latin alphabet to mark as well the /k/ as the /g/ sound, so why…
Arsen
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Was the change in spelling from "cw" to "qu" in English associated with any difference in pronunciation?

I always thought that "cw" in Old English represented /kw/, and the same for modern English "qu", and that the change from one to the other was purely orthographic, since the "qu" digraph was more familiar to Anglo-Norman scribes. But on an English…
brass tacks
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IPA Listening Training

Are there any programs that will play a sound and allow the user to choose which sound was played? The options would need to be IPA or some other descriptive method (e.g., voiceless alveolar stop). Ideally it would be able to start in the…
Zach
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Is there a difference between plurality in semantics and in morphology?

With regard to morphology a common example of a lexeme is [dog, dogs] where dogs is the plural inflexion of the lemma dog modified by the -s suffix, marking plurality. Although I can accept that dog and dogs are, morphologically speaking, the same…
neydroydrec
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Is voicing a gradient scale?

In one online linguistics community, I read the statement that "voicing is not all-or-nothing and that it is a gradient scale." This got me thinking: is this statement true or false? I guess it may be true, but I have no idea how. If true, what…
nb1
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Why were written sentences longer in the past?

These ELU answers affirm, but do not explain, the decrease in written sentence length. So why? To allow for comparison with modern dialects, I restrict this question to: writing in European languages (for those who desire specificity: Germanic and…
user5306
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1 answer

Select a portion of a sound in Praat

In Praat, I want to select a portion of the sound, extract it, and save it separately from the original file. This part of the sound is always between 0.108 s and 0.112 s because it is from pure tones. Here is the code: Read from file:…
5823574
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Why do we use an upward inflection when asking questions?

I have tried Googling where the upward inflection comes from but all I get are "Valley Girl" results. My curiosity in this started with my new German Language course I'm taking and noticed that the inflections are present there as well for…
Nick Williams
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Do animals have foreign languages?

Humans living in different parts of the world develop different languages; humans living in the same area speak the same language in order to be able to communicate with each other. We know that other animals too - at least some species - do…
SantiBailors
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Is there any language where time is grammaticalised by inflections on something other than its verbs?

I wonder if there's a language where grammatical tense is not expressed by inflections on its verbs, but by inflecting some other part of speech?
Nagavi Bindzuriani
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What is the reason for the semantic change bowl/pot/cup > head?

I was reading about problems with the assumption of basic vocabulary in Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction: Some 'basic vocabulary' appears to change rather easily for cultural reasons, for example, terms for 'head' in various…
user444
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3 answers

Software tools for transcribing speech

What is some good software I can use for listening to speech? I would like to be able to listen to a snippet of speech over and over again, and slow it down without changing the pitch, all with a streamlined user interface. I'm asking this from a…
Dangph
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Are there any words that have merged in pronunciation and spelling and then separated again?

Are there any words that started off different, merged in pronunciation and spelling at some point and then separated again? E.g. Two hypothetical words in Old English OX and OY are neither homophones nor homonyms In Middle English MX and MY are…
CJ Dennis
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