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1500 questions
45
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How do linguists place the vowels of a language precisely on the vowel trapezoid?
Since vowels in human speech are a continuous spectrum rather than a discrete set, many descriptions of languages I’ve seen — not only on Wikipedia — place the vowels of a language as dots in a two-dimensional grid. For example, here is the one for…
Timwi
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What is word order used for in "free word order" languages?
Consider languages whose case-systems allow the order of arguments to be changed without changing the arguments’ grammatical relations. (Note the 189 languages noted as having “no dominant word-order” at The World Atlas of Language Structure…
James Grossmann
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41
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Languages that are gaining morphological distinctions
In diachronic comparison of languages, say PIE to Latin to Romance, it is a classic recognition that the later languages strictly lose some of the morphologically marked categories. PIE had 8 noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, etc), Latin…
Mitch
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41
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Is there really a difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken?
What's the difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken? According to my understanding, agglutinative languages typically join prefixes and suffixes extensively.
For instance (although I'm probably a bit off here),…
Lucky
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40
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Is there a word in a dead or lost language that we lost the definition to?
Is there a word we lost the definition to? A word whose definition we lost to history? Something that is a part of our history but we forgot the meaning with time
Ro Belle
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39
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5 answers
Why does speech speed seem to vary between different languages?
I feel that French and Spanish speakers speak their languages faster than English speakers do. Is this difference real, or is it just a mistake in my observation (note: I am much less familiar with those languages than with English)? If it is real,…
Louis Rhys
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39
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Why is there (almost) no variety to the Hebrew accent in Israel?
Hebrew is my native language, and I grew up and spent most of my life in Israel.
Unlike English, in Hebrew we don't have a variety of accents. In fact, generally all of the people in Israel have the same accent, perhaps with the sole exception of…
Michael Seltenreich
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39
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Why do the Romance languages use definite articles, when Latin doesn't?
Classical Latin, as I understand things, barely has a definite article at all: ille is the nearest equivalent, and even this word is closer to English that than the. But Spanish, French and Italian are chock full of el/le/il/etc. What on earth could…
Tom Hosker
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Why isn't "I've" a proper response?
Suppose someone asked me the question, "Have you completed the project?". A standard response would be "I have". Why does the equivalent "I've" sound so strange and never used as a replacement?
I am also trying to think of other responses where…
The Monkey
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Is there any evidence that the modern word for "bear" is an euphemism which replaced the original taboo word?
I have read and heard many times the old linguistic story about the modern word for "bear":
Slavic: medvěd, niedźwiedź, ведмідь, ... "honey-eater"
Germanic: bär, bear, björn, ... "brown, shining"
Baltic: lācis, lokys, ... "hairy, bristly"(?)
There…
Honza Zidek
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37
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Are there languages that don't have this kind of ambiguity?
In the sentence "John told James that he's happy.", the pronoun "he" is ambiguous, since it could refer to either John or James.
Are there any languages which try to solve this kind of ambiguity by having different pronouns depending on whether the…
John
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Were ancient languages as sophisticated as modern languages?
Reading some dialogues from Socrates, it struck me how eloquently the people seemed to speak from those times thousands of years ago. (Although this might be a result of the translation.)
And yet this was a time when philosophy, logic and science…
zooby
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36
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6 answers
Can Modern Hebrew be considered an Indo-European language?
According to this Wikipedia page
Zuckermann argues that Israeli Hebrew, which he calls "Israeli", is
genetically both Indo-European (Germanic, Slavic and Romance) and
Afro-Asiatic (Semitic). He suggests that Israeli Hebrew is the
continuation…
Louis Rhys
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36
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5 answers
How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
How similar are the Ukrainian and Russian languages? For example, can I reasonably expect that anybody from Ukraine would be able to understand spoken Russian or be able to read a Russian text?
Martin
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36
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3 answers
Why is the word "war" in Romance languages predominantly of Germanic origin instead of Latin?
I wonder why in all Romance languages the word "war" ("guerra", with their multiple intonations) is a term that comes from Germanic languages, and that no modern language resembles the Latin "bellum". In English it actually came from Old French,…
Daniel Castro
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