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Are there any languages with a plufuture for tense sequencing?
(I admit a Romance bias in asking this question, perhaps expressing what I'm looking for is quite common in other families)
After answering a question recently on the Spanish SE on tense sequencing, I got to wondering. Many languages make frequent…
user0721090601
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Is explanation part of Historical Linguistics?
I am reading John McWhorter’s "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue". One thing called my attention in the book: he spends a great deal of effort trying to show how scholars have examined the history of English and yet failed to explain why certain…
Otavio Macedo
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"Torpedo compartment" for glove compartment?
In Turkish, the glove compartment of a car is called "torpido gözü", the literal translation of which is "torpedo compartment".
None of the dictionaries I have access to has an etymology for the usage.
I scanned the words for glove compartment in…
cyco130
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Is there a paradigmatic formalism for dependency grammars?
When looking on the web, wikipedia for example, at the concept of
constituent, it is associated with the concept of phrase structure,
and rather quickly with context-free languages (as the paradigmatic
example), or more generally Linear Context Free…
babou
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Is there a PIE feminising noun suffix?
I was wondering whether anyone knows the Proto-Indo-European equivalent of the Greek suffixes -ina (-ίνα) or -issa (-ισσα), or whether PIE has any different feminising suffixes that work similarly?
Fleur
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A multilingual home, a pro or a con?
My question is about the appropriate number of languages for a child to learn at home. I'm Finnish and me and my husband recently moved to Finland after living in Spain a few years. My husband's first language is Arabic but we communicate in…
Laura
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Comparative markers coming from low degree markers ("attenuatives")? (List such languages.)
Which languages have a marker of the comparative degree of adjectives that coincides with a marker of a low degree? ...or which has evolved from such a low degree marker?
(A message asking for the list of such languages was originally posted by Lisa…
imz -- Ivan Zakharyaschev
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Why are these Sanskrit words in the nominative case
I'm studying the Sanskrit mantra that starts with asato ma:
असतो मा सद् गमय asato mā sad gamaya
तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय tamaso mā jyotirgamaya
मृत्योर्मा अमृतं गमय mṛtyormā amṛtaṃ gamaya
The meaning of the first two lines is "lead…
allesklar
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Do native speakers of different languages make different mistakes in English?
Do native speakers of different languages make different mistakes when speaking in English?
For example, do native speakers of Japanese make different mistakes than native speakers of Russian when they speak in English?
Wikipedia says that…
Golden Cuy
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What's the opposite of a pejorative suffix?
Many languages have a suffix (or some other alteration) that gives a pejorative meaning to a word. For example, in Spanish:
pájaro "bird" + -aco → pajarraco "big, ugly bird"
What do you call a suffix that gives an "anti-pejorative" meaning to a…
Joe
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What currency does the term "flip sense verb" have in linguistics?
In a recent comment on the question Ergative Verbs and some discussion about them, jlawler introduced a term I had not previously encountered:
The rose smells good is completely different; this smell is a flip sense verb, with quite different…
hippietrail
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Are there different terms for when a language has two ways to spell a sound vs. two ways to pronounce a spelling?
In languages that don't have a perfect 1:1 mapping between sounds and letters in their written form there are two possibilities.
In English "bow" and "bough" are two spellings with a single pronunciation /baʊ/
In English /bəʊ/ and /baʊ/ are two…
hippietrail
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6
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3 answers
What parts of speech are the most, and least, susceptible to linguistic change? And why?
What parts of speech are the most susceptible, and the least susceptible, to linguistic change? And why?
I would think that nouns are the most susceptible, and that closed word classes, such as articles and conjunctions, are the least susceptible.…
curious-proofreader
6
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3 answers
Is there some intrinsic relationship between the nominative plural and genitive singular?
In Latin the similarity between the nominative plural and genitive singular is most striking:
First: porta (Nom/Sing) and portae (Nom/Pl), portae (Gen/Sing) and portarum (Gen/Pl)
Second: servus (Nom/Sing) and servī (Nom/Pl), servī (Gen/Sing) and…
Ryan David Ward
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Is there any fusional language where pronouns and nouns share the same declension?
Some analytic languages sometimes use the same prepositions for nouns and pronouns,e.g.
'I'm proud OF him' vs. 'I'm proud OF his book'.
Agglutinative languages may use the same affix for nouns and pronouns too,such as in Japanese.
However,fusional…
Kii
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