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1500 questions
7
votes
2 answers
Why is ʌ an open-mid back unrounded vowel?
Consider:
I've been studying the vowel chart recently and I don't understand why ʌ is an open-mid back unrounded vowel. Shouldn’t it be a short low central unrounded vowel like in the chart picture I added? Btw, the chart is from my textbook.
Jooyoung Kim
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7
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1 answer
Phase and aspect
Question
How to distinguish between phase and aspect?
From one-language point of view
To take an example from Mandarin Chinese, I don't see a difference between a phrase with (cf. the quote from (Li & Thompson 1981, p. 65) in section below) an…
Starckman
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7
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What linguistic sources discuss doubled -ed in -edly and -edness words?
Some linguists have written analyses of "double -er suffixation" in English, in formations from particle verbs such as fix up > fixer upper. For example: "Double -er suffixation in English: morphological, phonological and sociolinguistic…
brass tacks
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7
votes
1 answer
What is the dash or hyphen in reconstructed words in PIE?
I have seen many sources that describe the asterisk in something like *medhu- as indicating that the word is reconstructed and not observed in natural language. But I haven't seen a description of the trailing dash, and I see some places that just…
Barry
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7
votes
2 answers
How did Gothic "" (andbahti) become Medieval Latin "ambasiator"?
I found the following etymology of the word "ambassador" on Wiktionary.
From Middle English ambassadore, from Anglo-Norman ambassadeur, ambassateur, from Old Italian ambassatore, ambassadore, from Old Occitan ambaisador (“ambassador”), derivative…
Chickly
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7
votes
4 answers
Is there a clear linguistic reason for Swiss German not being considered its own Germanic language?
This question has been inspired by the fact that I’ve recently heard the Swiss talk among each other and I started to dig deeper. Having done minors in Italian and American studies which each included different depths of linguistics, I found it…
Kortelly Zamatosh
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7
votes
3 answers
Etymology of the Turkish word "rüzgâr"
In Turkish rüzgâr means "wind". From the looks of it (especially the long â vowel which is not native to Turkish) it seems to be of Persian origin: "روزگار". Some sources verify this too.
But in Persian (at least modern Persian) "روزگار" has a…
Mousa
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7
votes
4 answers
Language acquisition by 100% immersion -- any cases you know of?
I am looking for documented cases where some person or group of people learned a language (= gained ability to communicate) with no prior knowledge of the target language through being immersed in ~100% target language community.
Important…
Daniil M. Ozernyi
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7
votes
2 answers
Why is the Croatian word "vjetar" spelt with "je" rather than "e"?
Why is the Croatian word "vjetar" spelt with "je" rather than "e"? "je" comes from Proto-Slavic yat, and 'e' comes from Proto-Slavic 'en'. But there was 'en' in Proto-Slavic word for "wind", as we see by Latin "ventus" and English "wind".
FlatAssembler
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7
votes
1 answer
Does the orientation of the voiced uvular fricative IPA symbol (ʁ) not matter, or are these fonts buggy?
The symbol for voiced uvular fricative in IPA is ʁ (an inverted small uppercase letter "R"), but I have noticed that this symbol is not displayed consistently depending on where it is pasted (at least on my computer).
Here are some examples…
Ella D.
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7
votes
2 answers
Why is the proto-italic reconstruction of "corpora" "*korpezā"?
I was studying rhotacism and I came across the word corpora (plural of corpus). I would reconstruct the proto-italic form as *korpoza, but I saw the entry on Wiktionary and it says that the actual reconstruction is *korpezā.
Is this reconstruction…
Ergative Man
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7
votes
1 answer
What is "˥˩" in the IPA?
While reading the Wikipedia page on voiced bilabial trill, I came across a transcription in the occurrence section which looks like:
[tʙ̩˥˩]
The word is from Lizu language and means 'bean'. What is bothering me is the last V-shaped letter that I…
user30668
7
votes
2 answers
Examples of Phonological Variation / Morphological Structure Interacton
English coronal stop deletion, or TD-Deletion, is a variable process whereby word final /t/ and /d/ in clusters are deleted.
soft -> sof
A phonological rule for TD-Deletion could be given as:
{t,d} -> 0/ C__#
It can apply in a variety of…
JoFrhwld
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7
votes
5 answers
Why is it "easier" to understand a foreign language when reading than to speak it?
I know that the two mentioned abilities are different. I always find it quite straightforward to understand a foreign language when reading. provided I have a good knowledge of its grammar and a large vocabulary. But when it comes to speaking it,…
martina.physics
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7
votes
1 answer
Does the Bengali language have grammatical gender that's only optionally reflected in adjectives, or no grammatical gender at all?
I thought Bengali didn't have gender but did a quick Google search to check. I found pages saying that it does have gender and pages saying that it doesn't.
I'm not just talking about chat pages with silly observations and assumptions by…
hippietrail
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