Most Popular
1500 questions
6
votes
1 answer
Can you measure the rate of drift?
Is there a measure for the rate of language drift? In one answer to this question, it was suggested that drift had slowed for technological reasons, but may also be speeding up because of different technologies.
How is this slowing determined? I…
Sam
- 161
- 1
6
votes
2 answers
How did English and Portuguese develop the construction "have+pp"?
Native Portuguese speakers (myself included) often have a hard time dealing with the English present perfect tense-aspect.
In English, the present perfect is used for expressing past actions with present consequences. This is different from the…
Otavio Macedo
- 8,208
- 5
- 45
- 110
6
votes
3 answers
Why don't any languages have strictly one character for every single phonetic sound?
Of the languages I know about, most of them (not Chinese, Japanese, etc.) only have characters or character groups for specific sounds, and also can have a single specific sound generated by placing two or more characters together, such as (in…
Santiago Benoit
- 171
- 1
- 6
6
votes
3 answers
relative complexity of languages
Often, when talking casually about languages, people will say that one language is harder to learn than another. I always thought that this was a common misconception, and that other than the relationship to one's native language, there doesn't seem…
hunter
- 792
- 4
- 13
6
votes
0 answers
Do we know how common it is for ethnic Chinese and Tamils in Malaysia to speak each others language?
Here in Malaysia there are three main ethnicities, Malay, Chinese, Tamil, and most people speak more than one language.
There are four main language groupings:
Malay - national language and language of the ethnic majority.
Chinese - Hokkien, Hakka,…
hippietrail
- 14,687
- 7
- 61
- 146
6
votes
3 answers
What's the largest dictionary in the world?
I'm curious to know: what is the largest dictionary in the world?
The English and Malgache Wiktionaries are surely not far off with 3.8M and 3.5M entries but I found a blog post talking about a Chinese-Korean dictionary with nearly half a million…
the
- 243
- 1
- 2
- 8
6
votes
3 answers
What is the most recent example of a language which has split from another and become non-mutually comprehensible?
I know linguists like to say "no languages are older or younger than other languages" because they all evolved from ancient roots. With exceptions such as Nicaraguan Sign Language.
So let me explain that I'm specifically talking about cases where…
hippietrail
- 14,687
- 7
- 61
- 146
6
votes
2 answers
Which mutually intelligible language groups are spoken by more than 1 million people in Cameroon?
Which mutually intelligible language groups are spoken by more than 1 million people in Cameroon?
Wikipedia is not very helpful. the map below is the most useful thing I found thus far, which teaches me that there are 5 main language families. It…
the
- 243
- 1
- 2
- 8
6
votes
1 answer
L1 acquisition of morphology in heavily inflected languages
It is very common to hear two- and three-year-olds in English saying "I falled down," "She gived me it," etc. And the frequency of a verb form is inversely related to the age at which one is likely to master it, indeed to the point where past tenses…
Daniel Briggs
- 2,071
- 17
- 16
6
votes
6 answers
Ei (egg in German) and eye; Auge (eye in German) and egg
Is it known if there was some weird flipping of [Ei (egg in German) and eye] with [Auge(eye in German) and egg] that happened historically or do you think the apparent similarities are coincidence?
Richard Peterson
- 201
- 2
- 5
6
votes
0 answers
What languages use grammaticalized spoonerisms?
Here I define a "spoonerism" as the exchange of onset sounds between initially accented words in a phrase:
"sh(oving l)eopard" instead of "loving shepherd"
"f(ighting a l)iar" instead of "lighting a fire"
This can be seen as long-distance…
Damian Yerrick
- 718
- 5
- 18
6
votes
1 answer
How common is word order change?
During the course of their development, the word order of some languages change. Examples include Latin (SOV) that changed to SVO in the Romance languages, Proto-Austronesian (verb initial) that changed to SVO in most modern Austronesian languages,…
Otavio Macedo
- 8,208
- 5
- 45
- 110
6
votes
4 answers
Is there a trend toward more homophones over time? What can counteract that trend?
It is my understanding (correct me if I am wrong) that many homophones develop as a result of phonemic mergers.
For instance, I, like many Americans, have a "cot-caught" merger where I do not make a distinction between the "au" and the "short o".…
Mike
- 1,004
- 1
- 8
- 10
6
votes
2 answers
Do I have copyright issues when making a corpus from the web?
I realize that this is probably technically off-topic as it relates to copyright legalities of corpus construction. However, it is a practically very important issue for corpus linguistics and so I was hoping that I could ask the question here.
In…
mjandrews
- 173
- 5
6
votes
5 answers
Are there languages with consonant clusters that include consonants that never occur alone?
In the languages I know more about I can't think of any cases of consonant phoneme clusters that are not made up entirely of consonant phonemes which also occur on their own in the language.
But I'm wondering if this is not a universal phonology…
hippietrail
- 14,687
- 7
- 61
- 146