Most Popular
1500 questions
26
votes
4 answers
Why was מֹשֶׁה transliterated as [moʊzɨz]?
How did the name "מֹשֶׁה" come to be transliterated with a [z] at the end?
The OED entry notes that "Moses" derives from Biblical Hebrew "Mōšeh" and that the earliest attestations with a strident coda on the second syllable are Hellenistic Greek…
WAF
- 629
- 5
- 10
26
votes
8 answers
American English : are [ə] and [ʌ] different phonemes? (schwa vs. chevron)
What case can be made for considering whether [ə] and [ʌ] are different phonemes or not in American English? Please note the focus is on standard American English. EDIT: i.e.: on General American.
Many dictionaries use /ʌ/ in stressed position and…
Fabien Snauwaert
- 563
- 6
- 13
26
votes
4 answers
Worldwide map or data for linguistic distance?
I came upon an excellent graphical representation of the linguistic distance between a number of European languages. I'm looking for a similar worldwide map of currently spoken languages. Or at least the raw data. Even if it's not truly worldwide,…
Fiksdal
- 858
- 2
- 9
- 18
26
votes
2 answers
False-belief verbs
Some languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese, have a dedicated belief verb that one uses for describing false beliefs. For instance, in Mandarin, yiwei is used to describe beliefs that the speaker wants to emphasize are false; xiang is a…
Leah Velleman
- 4,585
- 22
- 35
26
votes
2 answers
Why do languages not share a root for "butterfly"?
In the article The Elusive Butterfly. Iconicity in Language (2001), William O. Beeman draws attention to the fact that most languages do not share a root for their word for butterfly. In other words, there is a serious resistance against borrowing…
Otavio Macedo
- 8,208
- 5
- 45
- 110
26
votes
3 answers
How do linguists distinguish between case endings and postpositions, especially in languages which have both and/or have no traditional grammar?
In my attempt to learn Georgian, an agglutinative language of the South Caucasus, I have learned that it has both case endings and postpositions.
I also have some familiarity with Korean and Japanese which are usually analysed as having…
hippietrail
- 14,687
- 7
- 61
- 146
25
votes
2 answers
Why are Native American names translated?
Is there a particular reason that Native American names, such as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Black Hawk, or Red Cloud, are translated into English phrases?
As far as I know, no other culture's names are treated as such: the vast majority seem to…
Nerrolken
- 479
- 4
- 9
25
votes
6 answers
Why is constituency needed, since dependency gets the job done more easily and economically?
I do dependency grammar (DG), and my personal view is that dependency gets the job done more efficiently than constituency by far. The average constituency parse (= phrase structure parse) contains almost twice as many nodes and edges as your…
Tim Osborne
- 5,747
- 1
- 17
- 40
25
votes
9 answers
Why did English lose declensions while German retained them?
Why did (or more specifically what caused) English lose declensions whilst they were retained in German? I ask as I have recently been reading into the various Germanic languages and it struck me that Old English had an equally if not more (in that…
user2521439
- 353
- 1
- 3
- 5
25
votes
1 answer
Why do many Arabic letters look exactly like other letters except for dots, yet have no similarity in sound?
Why do many Arabic letters look exactly like other letters except for dots, yet have no similarity in sound?
Examples:
BlueWhale
- 763
- 1
- 7
- 9
25
votes
3 answers
Can Someone Identify This Diacritic?
My mother is working on genealogy and has run across a diacritic mark that I could swear I've seen before but cannot identify. Here is the last name (said to be Austrian) from two documents. It's the mark over the second-to-last letter in the name.…
JBH
- 493
- 5
- 13
25
votes
3 answers
Is Sanskrit really the mother of all languages?
Hindus believe that "Sanskrit is the mother of all Languages".
It is a fact that Sanskrit has enriched most Indian Languages including the Dravidian Languages such as Telugu, as Latin enriched some languages like English.
Since Hinduism is believed…
Jvlnarasimharao
- 1,208
- 1
- 11
- 23
25
votes
2 answers
What do you call an IPA symbol that lacks a name (e.g. ɲ)?
Some IPA symbols such as ɲ lack any name, and when I tried searching for the symbol online, the pages I got only showed palatal nasal.
But I wonder what I should call it when I talk with others. Is there any standard conventional name for it? Or…
Blaszard
- 553
- 1
- 6
- 16
25
votes
17 answers
Is there a language whose writing is 100% phonemic?
Is there a language that has a complete one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes (letters) and the phonemes of the language?
In other words, is there a language that is 100% ideally phonemic?
Pacerier
- 621
- 1
- 6
- 12
25
votes
5 answers
Which Romance languages have reflexes of the Latin nominative in nouns?
It is generally accepted that the nominal forms in the Romance languages represent reflexes of the Latin accusative rather than the nominative. (This is even true for those languages that have masculine plurals in -i, which is actually a regular…
JSBձոգչ
- 2,185
- 21
- 27