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In which non-Sinitic languages do negative clauses retain older constituent order in SVC-derived complex predicates?
Many complex predicates are historically derived from serial verb constructions. This is not only true of the Sinitic family. For example, in Saramaccan (Byrne 1987, as cited in Givón 2009):
(1) a bi-fefi di-wosu kaba.
he TNS-paint…
WavesWashSands
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Did Latin "cum" get replaced in French by "avec" because "con" sounded obscene?
While the words for "with" in most Romance languages seem to be direct descendents from Latin "cum" (e.g. Spanish/Italian "con", Portuguese "com", Romanian "cu") it got replaced by "avec" in French. Could it be that this is due to the fact that the…
Dominik
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When did Dutch lose its Aspirated Consonants
from wikipedia
French, Standard Dutch, Tamil, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Modern
Greek, and Latvian are languages that do not have aspirated
consonants.
Dutch is a Germanic language without aspirated consonants. I think this is an influence of…
Houman
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What are some common diachronic origins of interrogative pro-forms?
My impression is that, whereas the grammaticalisation pathways of personal pronouns, agreement markers, auxiliary verbs, case markers, etc. all seem well understood, we know much less about interrogative pro-forms. We know what these guys can turn…
WavesWashSands
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7
votes
3 answers
Why are spoken languages more common than signed languages?
As I understand, there is no essential difference between spoken and signed languages. Both have the same kinds of phonetic, morphological, syntactical and semantic complexities, both are prone to ambiguities, both change over time etc. The main…
Otavio Macedo
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Representing knowledge extracted from output of dependency parsing
I am working on a problem to represent knowledge extracted from a paragraph and rank it to produce abstractive summaries. I have implemented dependency parsing using Stanford NLP, which gives dot format graph as an output.
The dependency-parsed…
Riken Shah
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7
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Devanagari digit variants
There are alternative glyphs for Devanagari numerals ५ (5), ८ (8) and ९ (9)[1], that look like cursive "y", ८ with upper horizontal bar, and mirrored "3", respectively.[2] These are sometimes called Hindi[3] or Calcutta[4] forms, while the…
mykhal
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Would an extended alphabet have been a hindrance to inventing computer technology?
One time in a conversation, a person who is very knowledgeable about computers off hand mentioned that it would have been difficult, maybe even impossible, to have developed computational technology in a culture where the language had a complex…
Questioner
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How different were Proto-Italic and Proto-Germanic?
It's (generally) accepted that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) evolved into the subfamilies Proto-Italic, Proto-Germanic, and Proto-Iranian among others.
English uses a Latin Writing system which evolved form a Greek writing system (which evolved from a…
Travis
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Why does the name for Germany vary so much between languages?
I understand that there are occasionally one or two different origins for the same word, but for Germany there are at least six distinct roots found in languages of nearby countries. Why so for Germany but not France?
English: Germany
Spanish:…
rootmeanclaire
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Difference Phrasal Verb, Prepositional Verb and Prepositional Phrasal Verb
I am not sure how one can see the difference between these three. I can give an example of the three - respectively come in, went into and got along without - but I don't know why these are what they are. Can some one explain these terms as clearly…
Bram Vanroy
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What is the purpose of Subject-Verb agreement?
An important rule in English grammar is "subject-verb agreement". It basically states that a verb must conform to the form of the noun (i.e. Singular/Plural). My question is:
What is the purpose of this rule?
It doesn't seem to play a huge role in…
user3436836
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Is the word "here" a preposition?
In a related question, I got entangled in a debate whether the word "here" (which I would classify readily as an adverb) is in reality a preposition. I am curious which modern analyses find syntactical similarities between "here" and words like "in,…
Eleshar
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Earliest recognition that Romance languages are related
I don't know if this is a question for this Stack Exchange or for the History Stack Exchange, but I would like to know when people first understood that the Romance languages were related. I have found a 13th century text from northwestern France…
Shimon bM
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Declensions in Polish
Declension, as far as I know, corresponds to the act of creating boxes where you can pile up nouns that follow the same rule when inflected (generally due to cases). Classical Latin is often said to have five declensions; modern Greek and Russian,…
QuantumBrick
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