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Did Romance languages evolve in North Africa?

So, I know that the dialects of Vulgar Latin evolved into the Romance languages in the Western Roman Empire, but I've always wondered why they only formed in Europe instead of in North Africa. Does anyone know? What languages were spoken in North…
DeLissaplitz Anonymous
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Is spoken English more efficient than other languages?

Oftentimes while watching a subtitled foreign film, I find that reading the subtitles aloud (usually in my head) at the same1 pace as the speaker takes less time than what's spoken in the native language. Is it possible that spoken English is more…
Zairja
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Is there a language known to have developed a case system?

There are many languages which, having descended from a language with a complex case system, have lost or greatly simplified theirs: Bulgarian (Slavic), English (Germanic), most Romance languages etc. All of the above are ultimately from PIE which…
Quassnoi
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What is the function of the soft sign (Ь) in Russian?

After some searching, I'm still unsure about what function the soft sign (Ь) performs in Russian. I have read that it indicates declension, palatisation, and iotation in different contexts, but with limited understanding of what the latter two…
Mad Banners
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Is the countable vs mass noun distinction common outside English?

English makes a difference between count nouns (also known as countable nouns) and mass nouns (also known as uncountable nouns). Count noun: One cat, two cats, few cats. Mass noun: Some information, little information. (Both depending on sense: One…
hippietrail
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What is the idea behind calling the adverb the garbage can of words?

As chance would have it, I came across three unrelated persons each describing the adverb as the the garbage can among the word classes. It happened in Germany and the original wording was: Das Adverb dient als der Abfalleimer unter den Wortart…
Abdul Al Hazred
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7 answers

What about the sound change initial n -> initial l?

While learning (a little) Cantonese, I was annoyed by the fact that every initial [n] was converted to [l], so that the word "you", written néih hóu in guidebooks is universally pronounced léih hóu People would, if pressed, say that the…
Ron Maimon
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Does anyone know of text message corpora?

I am looking for a large corpus of text messages. By large, I am hoping to have at least 15,000 text messages in my sample. I am fine with combining several smaller corpora into a larger corpus as I will also be adding thousands of text messages…
Dan
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Why does stop VOT duration vary depending on place of articulation?

From the (albeit citation needed) section of the Wikipedia article on aspiration: Spanish /p t k/, for example, have voice onset times (VOTs) of about 5, 10, and 30 milliseconds, whereas English /p t k/ have VOTs of about 60, 70, and 80 ms. Korean…
Steven
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What do WordNet::Similarity scores mean?

I am using WordNet Interface in NLTK, which facilitates computation of a number of similarity metrics: Path similarity Leacock-Chodorow Similarity Wu-Palmer Similarity Resnik Similarity Jiang-Conrath Similarity Lin Similarity I tried computing all…
piggs_boson
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Why is it that Latin was more "successful" in the western part of the Empire than in the eastern part?

The Roman empire ruled over the lands around the Mediterranean for hundreds of years, and I imagine imposed its language on its subjects. But why is it that the western part of the empire (France, Spain, Italy, etc) still speaks the descendant of…
Louis Rhys
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Is there a difference between /d/ and /t̬/?

IPA contains diacritics for indicating voiceless (/x̥/) and voiced (/x̬/) sounds. There are also different symbols for many voiced/voiceless pairs, e.g. /d/ and /t/ or /g/ and /k/. Is there a difference between the sounds /d/ and /t̬/?
user101
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5 answers

What empirical evidence can be produced that all syntactic structure is binary branching?

A tenet of the Minimalist Program is that all syntactic structure is binary branching. Merge always merges two constituents to a greater constituent until the greatest constituent, the sentence, is reached. What empirical evidence does the MP…
Tim Osborne
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Which phenomena compensate for sound losses in languages?

There is a tendency in all of the world’s languages to drop word sounds, especially unstressed syllables. One example is the word for “winter” in Proto-Algonquian, “peponwi”, which developed into “aa” in Cheyenne, after a series of sound droppings1.…
Otavio Macedo
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Are there any languages that mark nouns as mass?

Nouns like water, mud, furniture in English are odd with plural morphology (adding -s, as in furnitures), with numerals (three furniture(s)), and seem to have their own quantifier (much water but not much boys), and are typically referred to as mass…
Alexis Wellwood
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