Questions tagged [comparative-linguistics]
A study of the relationships or correspondences between the languages that have a common origin. Formerly known as Comparative Grammar, Comparative Philology.
228 questions
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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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Looking for historical comparative linguists and texts of Sumerian language?
I have a question(s) I hope someone can answer here. Many may be familiar with the ancient Sumerian language and the argument that it is a language isolate (i.e., a language with no demonstrable ...
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Are Flora and Fauna unreliable in language reconstruction?
I have glimpsed a paper, perhaps it was a review, that spoke negatively of the use of animal and plant names in the reconstruction of language families.
This has impressed me a lot but I was ...
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Information rate of ultra-information-sparse languages
There have been some research in recent years into the relationship between information density (ID) and speech rate (SR); two well-known examples are:
Pellegrino, François, Christophe Coupé & ...
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What are some examples of asymmetrically mutual intelligibility?
Probably most of the time, dialect >>>>> standard language than standard language > dialect.
I read about Portuguese understand Spanish more than vice versa.
Here is an answer of ...
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Could there be another relative language of the ancient Egyptian language closer to it than the Coptic?
The standard position in Egyptology is that the ancient Egyptian language was lost and that its closest relative was the Coptic, how could this conclusion have been reached in the early period of ...
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Why does PIE *sneygʷʰ- ("snow") give L. nix, Gk. νίφα (acc.)?
What happens to internal /e/ and semivowel /y/ in *snéygʷʰm̥ to yield L. nix? I have no clue how that vowel change works.
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Could the initial d- in the word for tongue be originally a prefix?
I am looking for the most ancient proto-world lemmas and it seems, the word for tongue is shared by many families from over the world. Here are some selected examples:
Niger-Congo:
* Proto-Heiban: ...
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Are any languages objectively simpler to learn than others as a native speaker?
Are there any languages which are objectively easier to learn from birth than others?
This might be broken into two parts - the spoken form, and the written form
For example, are African "click&...
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What's the gender of "nice" in "Mary is a nice person"?
I just read this rule in Greek Essential Grammar:
This passage says that, in the Greek sentence for "Mary is a nice person", the adjective nice is masculine because it must agree with the ...
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Words for tongue in Tungusic
In Tungusic there are attested the following words for tongue:
Manchu: ilenggu
Nanai: siŋmu
Evenki: inni, čoli
Wikitionary postulates that the words ilenggu, siŋmu and inni are related and gives ...
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Is Russian the most diverged Slavic language? [closed]
Does the Russian language have more innovations and divergent development from other languages in the Slavic branch?
I am asking, because I always had the feeling, that the tense and pronunciation in ...
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Could the precursor to Pre-Proto-Quechua have been a monosyllabic tonal language?
So this has been intriguing me for years:
In 'Perspectives on the Quechua-Aymara Contact Relationship and the Lexicon and Phonology of Pre-Proto-Aymara', Nicholas Emlen mentions, citing Adelaar (1986) ...
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How to write a rule for total assimilation of sounds?
I am looking at this list of words; the first column is from Sanskrit, and the second is from a daughter language Prakrit.
sapta > satta
dugdha > duddha
udgāra > uggāla
tikta > titta
...
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Is Linguistic Nihilism a legitimate philosophical/linguistic position?
By Linguistic Nihilism, a subcategory of Nihilism (the position that denies value/ability/meaning/etc.), I mean the position that ...
There's A Problem: Any, all languages are inadequate for every ...
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Are the gramatical cases slowly disappearing in Romanian or they were never that used in the common speech?
Where I live in Muntenia, people rarely use the dative anymore and replace it with the preposition “la” + the nominative/accusative form of the noun or pronoun. “Am dat la băiat să mănânce” instead of ...
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Questions about the "Hand of Irulegi"
The Hand of Irulegi is a recently found artifact from Navarra, Spain. It is dated in 1st c. BCE and carries an inscription touted as the oldest attestation of the Basque language.
The text can be ...
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Etymological relationship between picture/image and education/formation
There are German words Bild (picture/image) and Bildung (education/formation).
In Russian, education is образова́ние [obrazovaniye], whilst obraz in many Slavic languages means either directly picture/...
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If Hebrew is not related to Slavic, why are there apparent sound correspondences?
We have
Hebrew: šeš;
Russian: šestʹ;
Ukrainian: šistʹ;
Latin: six;
English: six;
Hebrew: yeš;
Russian: yestʹ;
Ukrainian: ye, isnuye;
Latin: est;
English: is;
Hebrew: ze;
Russian: se;
Ukrainian: сe [...
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What is the subfield of linguistics that studies how different languages use different grammatical and lexical tools to put expressions together?
For example, to express possession, in English we say "I have a pen", while in Russian we say "У меня есть ручка" (lit. "A pen is near me"), while in Latin we say ...
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How similar are Ukrainian and Russian?
How similar are the Ukrainian and Russian languages? For example, can I reasonably expect that anybody from Ukraine would be able to understand spoken Russian or be able to read a Russian text?
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Is there such a thing as attributive vs. modifier uses of adj? Is un rojo carro vs. un carro rojo the same difference as 红房子 vs. 红的房子？
In teaching Spanish I often explain the difference between pre-nominal adjectives and post-nominal adjectives as the difference between an English noun phrase in which the adjective is stressed, and ...
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Quantitative methodology for contrastive pragmatics in corpus-based settings
I am interested in literature regarding methodology that could be relevant for quantitative research into differences in pragmatic meaning between two 'equivalent' concepts in two languages (in other ...
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Why does purple mean red in some places?
The English word purple nowadays refers to the color that is a mixture of blue and red. This word ultimately derives from the Latin purpura which also referred to that color, so it is faithful to that ...
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Besides Proto-Indoeuropean, what would be the list of the 10 most acurately reconstructed Proto-languages?
Proto-Indoeuropean language (p-IE) has been the subject of study for more than 200 years, and a great deal of work has been published has been written about p-IE reconstruction. In addition, there are ...
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