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Lists of linguistic resources
In the interest of cultivating a professional, academic community, I posted this question on Meta. One comment was to open a community-wiki question inviting others to contribute to a list of academic sources in the field of linguistics.
There are…
mollyocr
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Articles before the name of a person
In the question “La” or “le” before a person's name? on the French SE site, the asker refers to the phenomenon that in some rural/dialect settings the first name of a person is preceded by the definite article.
The same construction is always used…
Phira
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Is future tense in English really a myth?
Does English really have two tenses - present and past? Some linguists argue that it is a Latinate fallacy to think that English has three tenses.
Some English professors and even some native speakers do not accept the proposition.
If it is true,…
Jvlnarasimharao
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Is there a list of mutually intelligible languages?
Is there a list of languages which are mutually intelligible (i.e. a speaker of A can understand language B and [perhaps] vice versa)?
And would this beg the question of whether they really are separate "languages"?
BlueWhale
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What are the historical origins of terms for north, south, east and west?
In the course of researching the etymology of the word "Australia", I was trying to find the Latin words for north and south (the cardinal directions). I found some websites that translate north as "Septentrionalis", but I understand this to refer…
dotancohen
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English text corpus for download
I need a free English language corpus with at least 15 million words. The corpus should contain one or more plain text files. There should be no tagging, just raw text. The corpus should be free. I would prefer if the corpus contained was for modern…
Baz
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Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?
Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender? Like a feminine "I" or a masculine "you".
Pablo
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Is it unusual that English uses possessive for past tense?
When learning some basic French, I was somewhat surprised to learn that phrases of the form "I have found the cat" generally translate almost word-for-word from English (J'ai trouvé le chat). To me, it's not immediately obvious that possession ("I…
llama
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Why don't you get back the original text when you use translation software to translate something into another language and then back into English?
I translated "How to use Web?" into some other language using machine translation, but after I translated the result back into English, it is not the same as the first text I put into the translator.
Why did that happen?
new Q Open Wid
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Are there any languages or cultures that have genderless given names?
In the U.S. where I live it is possible to be right almost all of the time when guessing the sex of a person from his or her given name: Ronald, George (Sand and Elliot notwithstanding), William, Michael (Learned notwithstanding), Warren and Chuck…
Robusto
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Is there a difference between an affricate and a plosive+fricative consonant cluster?
Is there a difference between an affricate and a plosive+fricative consonant cluster?
According to wikipedia, there is a difference between a plosive+fricative sequence, as in the following example
catch it /kæt͡ʃ.ɪt/
cat shit /kæt.ʃɪt/
But I…
Peter Olson
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What meaningful distinction is there between morphology and syntax?
While I am not interested in hearing the common distinction made in introductory text-books, I am interested in hearing what meaningful distinction there can be between morphology and syntax. Is there any structural, or rather formal, difference…
Perry
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Why is English classified as a Germanic rather than Romance language?
I am not a linguist. I do not know German nor French. The majority of English vocabulary is derived from Romance languages. Given these facts, I ask for a simple and convincing demonstration (using an example) that the "basic structure" of English…
Corey
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Is there a technical name for when languages use masculine pronouns to refer to both men and women?
I know a little Arabic, and I also know English. They both have the notion of "gender" built into their syntax. I am Persian and I speak Farsi, which does not have "gender" built into its grammar.
In those languages which have gender, sometimes…
Saeed Neamati
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Why do so many core Romanian words with Latin roots come from different roots than in the other Romance languages?
Romanian is a romance language like Catalan, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Spanish so much of its core vocabulary is derived from Latin.
Why then even in core vocabulary does Romanian so often seem to be based on different Latin roots than its…
hippietrail
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