Newest Questions
11,713 questions
3
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Do I have to transcribe all pronunciation details if I use the [] transcription?
Let's say I transcribe the pronunciation of "relatively" in General American. Do I have to type [ˈɹɛɫɨɾɪvɫi] or can I omit some details (because perhaps I don't know all of them) and type ...
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Why it is that 'sk' remained 'sk' in the change from Scardona to Skradin, but 'sk' changed to 'šk' in dialectal Croatian "baškotin" from "biscoctus"?
I cannot help but notice that, in some early Latin borrowings into Croatian, 'sk' remained 'sk' (as in the toponym Skradin, from the ancient name Scardona), and yet, in other early Latin borrowings, ...
- 1,048
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1
answer
65
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Why Collins decided to ignore the declination effect when marking intonation?
In Beverley Collins' Practical English Phonetics and Phonology, and in the Marking systems for intonation section, the author wrote:
We employ the following interlinear marking system for intonation.
...
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2
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178
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Does "yeet" vs "eat" mean the glottal stop is phonemic in english?
Given three observations of mine:
English speakers put glottal stops at the beginning of words beginning with a vowel
English speakers don't put glottal stops at the beginning of words beginning with ...
- 127
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0
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45
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What do the terms "semantic content" and "semantic value" mean?
I hear philosophers of language throw around these terms (like this term lacks semantic value, or this one is a semantic failure) but I have no idea what they mean. I know there is some overlap with ...
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0
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54
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Origin of the Russian adjectival endings -ий/-ия/-ие
I always thought that Russian adjectival endings -ий/-ия/-ие are related to Latin suffix+endings -ius/-ium and came from PIE suffix -i-, that is suffix+endings -ios/-ieh2/-iom. This suffix meant ...
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Origin of the German masculine -r in wer, der, dieser: inherited or analogical?
Modern German shows a recurring masculine nominative ending -r, examples are:
wer
der
dieser, jener, and
strong adjectives (blind-er)
Proto-Germanic nominative masculines ended in -z (e.g. hwaz, sa, ...
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1
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0
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89
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How to dump all the nouns for a given language from wiktionary [closed]
I am developing software to help with language learning. One of the modules analyses text to provide grammatical information on each word, when the user clicks on it. To implement that module I need ...
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1
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1
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219
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Is ancient Hebrew readable to a generic speaker of Hebrew today?
As I was reading some lightweight (i.e., not historical) articles about Judaism, it stroke me that some texts from ancient copies of the Talmud looked very much like contemporary Hebrew.
I do not ...
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0
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77
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How to call the division between morphology, phonology, syntax and semantics?
We usually see the divisions of linguistic analyses into four areas, namely morphology, phonology, syntax and semantics. I want to know if there's a formal name for this division or the four-fold set ...
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0
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1
answer
44
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Can alpha features be used such that the alpha coefficients can be multiplied when writing a rule using feature arrays?
I was trying to write a formal rule about how Hawaiian adapts English loanwords into Hawaiian phonemes.
Hawaiian does not have voiced stops nor does it have alveolar stop phonemes. The alveolar stop [...
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0
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34
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Can concepts from model theory be used on natural language and theories in natural language?
Can concepts from model theory be used on natural language and theories in natural language? I ask because of the following:
According to the Wikipedia article on Model Theory, the following holds: A ...
1
vote
0
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116
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Does it make sense to use an accent mark in one-syllable words?
Does it make sense and is it useful to use an accent mark /ˈ/ in transcriptions of pronunciation of one-syllable words such as 'bed'. Some dictionaries do it, but most don't
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1
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1
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233
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How does 'make me a sandwich' work?
It's an old joke: never ask a wizard to make you a sandwich. It works because 'make' has two ditransitive constructions (meaning it takes two objects, both without a preposition).
The first is the ...
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1
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151
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How should I transcribe syllabic consonants phonemically in English?
I wonder how I should trascribe phonemically English words that contain a syllabic consonant like 'listen'. Is it phonemically /ˈlɪs.(ə)n/ or /ˈlɪs.n/ or /ˈlɪs.ən/ or /ˈlɪs.n̩/
If there's no ...
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0
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36
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In which language varieties or language families do two or more negatives in the same clause consistently convey positive meaning?
I've heard of a lot of language varieties in which two negatives in the same clause conveys, or even intensifies, negation. There are plenty of non-standard varieties of English in which double ...
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1
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1
answer
121
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Do "Lickety-Split","Ship-shape", and "Chop-chop" have any internal logic that makes them recognisable as meaning "Quick"?
I've noticed this happens across cultures as well, notably the German "Zack-zack" and the Indian "Fatafat"
These phrases seem to have a repeating motif of some sort; reduplication ...
1
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0
answers
75
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Vowel sounds in the word "going" (AmE) on a spectrogram
I have a spectrogram of the word "going" and of the word "destroy" (the "troy" part) by the same speaker. Is it possible to tell if there's an /oʊ/ in "going"? (...
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4
answers
3k
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How do dictionaries determine correct spelling?
I've heard that most modern dictionaries are descriptive. If so, why do they not give 'accomodate' as a valid word? Or why do they not say that 'your' means 'you are'? It's easy to find real examples ...
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0
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76
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Constituent order in Scythian (or Old Iranian) in two weird place names
The place names Παντικάπαιον (the modern city of Kerch, in Crimea) and Παντικάπης (a branch of the Dnieper) are thought to have a Scythian etymology. Both contain the words *panti- ‘way, path’ (< ...
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1
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In Old Norse, why are Neutre Adjectives, Determiners, and Possessives affixed by <-t>?
In particular, those of the Strong Declension in the cases Nominative and Accusative, Adjectives, Determiners, and Possessives are routinely followed by a <-t>. To the best of my admittedly ...
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8
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2
answers
2k
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Why do dictionaries say that 'trip' is pronounced /trɪp/ while I can hear [tʃɹɪp]?
I wonder why English dictionaries say that trip is pronounced /trɪp/ (not /tʃrɪp/) while I hear many people saying [tʃɹɪp] and even listening to the audio recordings that these dictionaries provice, ...
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0
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119
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Latin eventualis - why do European descendants mean “potentially”? But in English, eventually means “in the end”? [closed]
Why did Latin eventualis branch out to mean "potentially" in continental European languages, but "in the end" in English? How are the senses of "potentially" and "in ...
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0
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143
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Latin 'actualis' - why do European descendants mean ‘present, current’ ? But in English, actual means 'real, existing’? [closed]
I am stumped by the divergence of meaning of descendants from Latin actualis. i post there as i am asking about systematicity of at least five languages. My initial research shows:
Latin actualis ...
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0
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43
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Searching for ommited words in COCA using english-corpora interface
I'm attempting to examine the examples of the omission of copula "to be" (e. g. "You sure?" or "She liking me.") in COCA, though I can't figure out any way to search for ...
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2
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241
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Are /u/ and /i/ phonemes in English?
I wonder whether /u/ (as in situation) and /i/ (as in happy) are phonemes in English, particularly in RP and GA. Many dictionaries treat them in such way:
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/...
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4
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0
answers
129
views
What role does feature checking play in modern minimalism?
I have taken an introductory course in Minimalist syntax and am now doing research on the mathematical structure of Merge as described by Marcolli, Chomsky, and Berwick (2025).
They point to Merge and ...
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3
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1
answer
197
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Are there languages that strictly distinguish "to give" in the sense of "to transfer possession" from "give" in the sense of "to transfer ownership"?
I can think of many languages having a general "to give" verb that then also pick out these more specific senses—English "to hand", "to lend", "to supply", and ...
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1
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121
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Why does virtual doubling work?
As a beginner Hebrew learning I recently learned about the definite article. My question is concerning the so-called virtual doubling (by Lily Kahn). In the case a word starts with the consonant ה or ...
2
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0
answers
54
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Terminology around possessor vs. possessee as the head in possession
I have a question that I want to ask about the typology of possession, but I don't know how to ask because I don't what the relevant terminology for it is, so first I have to ask about terminology.
...
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3
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Is vowel length phonemic in General American?
Wikipedia says:
Vowel length is not phonemic in General American, and therefore vowels such as /i/ are customarily transcribed without the length mark.
But dictionaries sometimes distinguish between ...
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143
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If Croatian "mjesec" (moon/month) is cognate to Latin "mensis", thus having a nasal 'e' in Proto-Slavic and not a yat, why is it not spelt "mesec"?
So, I suppose that the Croatian word "mjesec" meaning both "moon" and "month" is an exact cognate to the Latin word "mensis" meaning "month", right? ...
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0
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142
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Orthography: Change in popularity of "okay" vs "OK"
The "okay" spelling has in recent decades become the most common one, by a significant margin (according to Google Ngrams):
I realize that linguistic change is continuous and unpredictable, ...
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1
vote
2
answers
194
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Why do we regard gender as pretty meaningless but noun classes as meaningful?
I'm new to this StackExchange and just getting interested in linguistics.
When we are studying languages that have two or three genders (masculine, feminine, and maybe neuter), we tend to regard the ...
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1
answer
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How did "hospital" lose its first syllable in some languages?
German Spital, Romanian spital which Wiktionary says is borrowed from either German, Italian ospitale, or Greek σπιτάλι. Looking at the Wiktionary article in other languages suggests that there are ...
- 3,000
2
votes
1
answer
348
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Why do English dictionaries transcribe syllabic l in different ways?
For example, look at the pronunciation of the "bubble" in different dictionaries:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bubble – it uses /(ə)l/
https://www....
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98
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Pronunciation of going to/gonna in Hiberno-English dialects
I'm taking an interest in the phonology of contracted "to" (as in "gonna", "wanna", etc), and I came across this entry in a linguistics forum, commenting on the ...
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Why doesn’t my custom font copy-paste correctly into Google search bar or other apps?
I created a custom font using FontForge/FontStruct. The symbols display correctly when I type in Word or other editors that use my font.
But when I try to copy and paste the text (for example, into ...
1
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0
answers
73
views
Why do similar concepts group differently across languages?
I noticed something interesting: in Chinese, the words 蠕虫 (rúchóng), 昆虫 (kūnchóng), and 虫 (chóng) are quite close in meaning, but in English they correspond to three distinct words: worm, insect, and ...
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1
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"Roots" inherited form Latin
Is it legit to take such roots into account synchronically?
For example -rect- "guide; rule; right; straight" in words like correct, direct, erect, indirect, misdirect, rectangle, rectify, ...
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1
answer
228
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Is there a word for the morpheme that makes words plural?
I'm just getting started in linguistics and I wondered if there is a word for the morpheme that makes a word plural (e.g. usually -s in English). Maybe pluralizer?
And similar for the morphemes that ...
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1
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Why is 'Trà với đường vui lòng cho!' ungrammatical in Vietnamese?
I’ve seen
Vui lòng cho trà với đường!
used to politely request tea with sugar. However, when I try moving 'vui lòng cho'
(“please”) to the end, as in 'Trà với đường vui lòng cho', I was told it is ...
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1
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Why is the phonemic transcription of "the" /ði/ not /ðɪj/ although it's pronounced as [ðɪj] and there are phonemes /ɪ/ and /j/ in English?
According to Wiktionary when the English word the occurs immediately before vowel sounds, it is pronounced [ðɪj] phonetically.
Because there are minimal pairs for each of those individual sounds, you ...
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1
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107
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Darius in Zendish Begins with an N?
In Rudiments of an Egyptian dictionary... by Thomas Young, I came across the text "The name DARIUS is said to begin with N in the Zendish" https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug....
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1
answer
77
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Are the Sanskrit and Slavic adjectival suffixes cognate?
The words तृतीया (Tritiya) and Третья (Tretiya) seem almost identical, both being feminine adjectives in the nominative case. Obviously the roots are cognates descended of *trey-, but my question is ...
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1
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142
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Metric for languages so complex you can't learn them by being a native speaker (and is English one)?
I vaguely recall from an undergrad psych course a discussion of the fact that some languages - and I believe there were only a few that were widely spoken, and if I recall correctly Japanese was one ...
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0
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82
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Is there a name for transformations that manipulate constructions with semantically overlapping constituents? [closed]
Is there a name for transformations like the following where there is semantic overlap between the means, purpose, and action described by the construction?
Action/means:
Open the door by turning the ...
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1
vote
0
answers
93
views
Studies about double meaning as a language in itself
In French, I don't know if it is the same in the other cultures, sentences nearly never mean what they mean. People are talking with double senses. They say a sentence, but what is important is never ...
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1
answer
121
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What exactly is the reason we hear two syllables as separate?
I have been focusing a lot on words the past 5-10+ years, and especially on classifying words as 1, 2, 3+ syllables. But sometimes words that are "traditionally" assumed to be 1 syllable are,...
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1
answer
165
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Can adjectival prepositional phrases ever precede the noun/pronoun they modify?
In the following sentence:
Except for Cat, we all wanted to order pizza during lunch.
is "Except for Cat" an adjectival or adverbial prep phrase?
I think it is modifying "we", but ...
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